"If you don't like my manner—" Barrow retorted stormily. Then he cut his sentence in two, and glared at her. Her eyes glistened with slow-welling tears, and she bit nervously at her under Up. Barrow shrugged his shoulders. The twin devils of jealousy and distrust were riding him hard, and it flashed over Hazel that in his mind she was prejudged, and that her explanation, if she made it, would only add fuel to the flame. Moreover, she stood in open rebellion at being, so to speak, put on the rack.
She turned abruptly and left him. What did it matter, anyway? She was too proud to plead, and it was worse than useless to explain.
Even so, womanlike, she listened, expecting to hear Jack's step hurrying up behind. She could not imagine him letting her go like that. But he did not come, and when, at a distance of two blocks, she stole a backward glance, he had disappeared.
She returned to the boarding-house. The parlor door stood wide, and the curious, quickly averted glance of a girl she knew sent her quivering up to her room. Safe in that refuge, she sat down by the window, with her chin on her palms, struggling with the impulse to cry, protesting with all her young strength against the bitterness that had come to her through no fault of her own. There was only one cheerful gleam. She loved Jack Barrow. She believed that he loved her, and she could not believe—she could not conceive—him capable of keeping aloof, obdurate and unforgiving, once he got out of the black mood he was in. Then she could snuggle up close to him and tell him how and why Mr. Andrew Bush had struck at her from his deathbed.
She was still sitting by the window, watching the yellow crimson of the sunset, when some one rapped at her door. A uniformed messenger boy greeted her when she opened it:
"Package for Miss Hazel Weir."
She signed his delivery sheet. The address on the package was in Jack's handwriting. A box of chocolates, or some little peace offering, maybe. That was like Jack when he was sorry for anything. They had quarreled before—over trifles, too.
She opened it hastily. A swift heart sinking followed. In the small cardboard box rested a folded scarf, and thrust in it a small gold stickpin—the only thing she had ever given Jack Barrow. There was no message. She needed none to understand.
The sparkle of the small diamond on her finger drew her gaze. She worked his ring over the knuckle, and dropped it on the dresser, where the face in the silver frame smiled up at her. She stared at the picture for one long minute fixedly, with unchanging expression, and suddenly she swept it from the dresser with a savage sweep of her hand, dashed it on the floor, and stamped it shapeless with her slippered heel.
"Oh, oh!" she gasped. "I hate you—I hate you! I despise you!"