“You could not write to him?”
“Oh, no, I could not write to him.”
“I can easily understand that,” he fleered, full of vicarious rancor.
“It is a bauble in the shape of a key—it is set with a large diamond and a circle of rubies. It was understood between us as the key of his heart,” she could but falter at the revelation of the forlorn little sentimentalities, shallow of root and wilted in the sun of a sudden blaze of prosperity. “And I kept it,” she quavered.
“Randal would never think of the diamond and rubies,” he said, reaching, indeed, the limit. “You have too many jewels, doubtless, for your motive to be misconstrued.”
There was a moment of dead silence. “He could never have said that,” she replied, in a voice that trembled with anger. “He is not in the least like you. I hate you for looking like him.”
“Thank you for dispensing with ceremony and telling me this on so short an acquaintance. It is more than evident that you like neither of us over-much. May I ask what are the commands you design to lay upon me, for if you have no more to say I should be glad to withdraw, with your kind permission.”
“Only this,—that you will take this valuable which I chance to have with me and give it to him,—explaining that there was no sentimental motive in my retention of it, only the accident of overlooking it at a moment of great commotion.”
He remembered that this event was the famous nuptials that filled the countryside with éclat, and the metropolitan newspapers with the names of the guests of distinction and the description of their jewels and gowns. To him, to whom the journals had been sent in France, and to his brother, this tawdry phase of display cheapened the marriage and lowered it, and that it was the splendid superstructure on the ruins of the heart of the jilted lover did not serve to further commend it.
“I wonder that you remembered to return any of the little trinkets,” he remarked. “But, Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, you must forgive me for declining to repair your negligence. I really cannot undertake your commission. The relations between my brother and me are peculiarly tender. All my life I can remember almost in every scene that other self, from the time when we were little toddlers in our red coats and toboggan caps.”