Dick was silent, looking at Rose.
"Come and sit by me, dear," she said, holding out her hand to her husband. He came, sinking down on the sofa with a sense of relief, for he had been conscious of a weakness in the knees, as if on entering the room he had stumbled blindly against a bar of iron.
"Dick and I had just got to that part, when you opened the door," Rose went on. "We are afraid—you said yourself that Captain Hannaford was changed, the last time he came here."
"Only three days ago," George mused aloud. "He didn't look well. But he said he was all right."
"He would! You know how he hated to talk of himself or anything he felt, poor fellow. But I thought even then—I guessed——"
"What?"
"That it was a blow to him, hearing of Mary Grant's engagement." As she said this, Rose carefully did not look at her cousin. She was not at all anxious about Dick. She knew that he would "get over it," and even prophesied to herself that his heart would be "caught in the rebound" by the first very pretty, very nice girl who happened to be thrown with him in circumstances at all romantic. Mary was not his first love by any means, and would certainly not be his last; and meanwhile Rose felt that unconsciously he was enjoying his own jealous pain. Still, she did not wish to "rub it in." "We both imagined that Captain Hannaford was in love with Miss Grant," she explained; for one had to explain these things to George. She often thought it a wonder that he had come down to earth long enough to fall in love, himself; but when she observed this to him, he had answered that it was not coming down to earth.
"We were most of us more or less in that condition," Dick remarked bravely.
"The rest of you have a great deal left to live for, even without her," said Rose. "Captain Hannaford hadn't. But I'm thankful they're not likely, anyhow, to prove that his death was not—an accident."
"They don't go out of their way to prove such things here, ever," Dick mumbled.