“Well, well,” said Crailey, good-naturedly, “we weren't talking of me.” He set down the flask, went to his friend and dropped a hand lightly on his shoulder. “What made you break the guitar? Tell me.”
“What makes you think I broke it?” asked his partner sharply.
“Tell me why you did it,” said Crailey.
And Tom, pacing the room, told him, while Crailey stood in silence, looking him eagerly in the eye whenever Tom turned his way. The listener interrupted seldom; once it was to exclaim: “But you haven't said why you broke the guitar?”
“'If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out!' I ought to have cut off the hands that played to her.”
“And cut your throat for singing to her?”
“She was right!” the other answered, striding up and down the room. “Right—a thousand times! in everything she did. That I should even ap-proach her, was an unspeakable insolence. I had forgotten, and so, possibly, had she, but I had not even been properly introduced to her.”
“No, you hadn't, that's true,” observed Crailey, reflectively. “You don't seem to have much to reproach her with, Tom.”
“Reproach her!” cried the other. “That I should dream she would speak to me or have anything to do with me, was to cast a doubt upon her loyalty as a daughter. She was right, I say! And she did the only thing she could do: rebuked me before them all. No one ever merited what he got more roundly than I deserved that. Who was I, in her eyes, that I should besiege her with my importunities, who but her father's worst enemy?”
Deep anxiety knitted Crailey's brow. “I understood she knew of the quarrel,” he said, thoughtfully. “I saw that, the other evening when I helped her out of the crowd. She spoke of it on the way home, I remember; but how did she know that you were Vanrevel? No one in town would be apt to mention you to her.”