“Nothing, I am afraid. There is nothing to be said—or done; I have got to bear it, that is all! I am not the only man who has been—jilted.” The cruel word left his lips like a note of steel. “Probably my lot is all too common. Yes, I have got to bear it!”
“There—there is no doubt about it?” she asked.
“None, whatever,” he replied. “I have been down to the office and seen the list of passengers, and her name is among them, together with this man’s.”
“How bad, how heartless, she must be!” she murmured, indignantly.
He winced and looked aside; even in this, the first hour of his trouble, he could scarcely endure to hear Doris thus spoken of.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can scarcely believe that she has done what she has; it seems more like a dream than sober reality. But I suppose every man in my case feels like that.”
“If I could only do something for you!” she murmured, leaning forward, and looking up into his face with the sympathy which, coming from a woman, is so precious to a man, especially when the woman is young and beautiful.
“Thanks, awfully,” he said, trying to speak in a conventional tone to hide the acuteness of his suffering, “but, as I said, no one can do anything, except it is our old friend, Time. I shall ‘get over it,’” and he smiled, as the Spartan may have smiled while the fox was gnawing at his bosom.
“You look very tired,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “What will you do with yourself to-day? Will you—don’t think me obtrusive!—but will you come and drive with me—come, and do something? I am so afraid that you will sit here and mope.” She glanced round, then started and looked up at him, as if with a sudden remembrance of the situation. “But I am forgetting! I—I ought not to be here, ought I? Lord Neville, you don’t think ill of me for coming?” and the color rose to her face, and she dropped her eloquent eyes as if with a sudden shame.
“Think ill of you, Lady Grace!” he echoed, impetuously. “What, for coming to try and help a poor fellow with your sympathy? I can’t tell you how grateful I am! It was a kind action, which not one woman out of a thousand would have done!”