“Hit him in the head,” Henry explained. “Your name didn’t get in the papers; but you don’t for a moment imagine that everybody in town doesn’t understand, do you, Lily?”
She stamped her foot. “Understand what? What are you talking about? What does everybody understand?”
“Your plan,” he said, simply. “You don’t think you can lay out a man like that—a man that every other girl in the place is ready to fight you for—you don’t think you can do it in such a way as to make you the only girl who has a chance to see him, and then spend all your time with him, and day after day send him so many bushels of flowers that the florist himself gasps over it—and read to him hour after hour, and drive more hours with him—you can’t do all that and expect people not to see it, can you?”
Lily’s high colour was vanishing, pallor taking its place. “You needn’t believe I don’t hate you because I stop telling you so for a moment,” she said. “But there’s a mystery somewhere, and I’ve got to get at it. What do you mean I mustn’t expect people not to see?”
“Why, the truth about how he got hurt.”
Lily stepped back from him. “Henry Burnett,” she said, “Henry Burnett, do you dare——”
Henry interrupted her. He had come to apologize; but what he believed to be her hypocrisy was too much for him. “I don’t see the use of your pretending,” he said. “The whole population knows you did it on purpose.”
“Did what on purpose?”
“Hit him in the head with your golf ball on purpose!”
Lily uttered a loud cry and clasped her hands to her breast. Aghast, she stared at him with incredulous great eyes; but even as she stared, her mind’s eye renewed before itself some painful pictures that had mystified her—the spitefully uproarious girls in the park; her friend, Emma; the buzzing “tea”; the group at the gate as she came out;—and there were other puzzles that explained themselves in the dreadful light now shed upon them. Uttering further outcries, she sank into a chair.