“A hundred fiddlesticks!” said Dick furiously. “We have been deceived! No,” he stammered, “I mean YOU have been deceived—insulted!”
“Hush! Aunty will hear you,” murmured the girl despairingly.
Dick, who had thrown away his cousin's hand, caught it again, and dragged her along the aisle of light to the window. The moon shone upon his flushed and angry face.
“Listen!” he said; “you have been fooled, tricked—infamously tricked by these people, and some confederate, whom—whom I shall horsewhip if I catch. The whole story is a lie!”
“But you looked as if you believed it—about the girl,” said Cecily; “you acted so strangely. I even thought, Dick,—sometimes—you had seen HIM.”
Dick shuddered, trembled; but it is to be feared that the lower, more natural human element in him triumphed.
“Nonsense!” he stammered; “the girl was a foolish farrago of absurdities, improbable on the face of things, and impossible to prove. But that infernal, sneaking rascal was flesh and blood.”
It seemed to him to relieve the situation and establish his own sanity to combat one illusion with another. Cecily had already been deceived—another lie wouldn't hurt her. But, strangely enough, he was satisfied that Cecily's visitant was real, although he still had doubts about his own.
“Then you think, Dick, it was actually some real man?” she said piteously. “Oh, Dick, I have been so foolish!”
Foolish she no doubt had been; pretty she certainly was, sitting there in her loosened hair, and pathetic, appealing earnestness. Surely the ghostly Rosita's glances were never so pleading as these actual honest eyes behind their curving lashes. Dick felt a strange, new-born sympathy of suffering, mingled tantalizingly with a new doubt and jealousy, that was human and stimulating.