“Oh, yes, I understand!” he said. “I understand more clearly than you guess, dearest. Try not to think too hardly of me. Some day—before long, perhaps—you will know how deeply and truly I love you!” and he turned and left her.
Doris remained standing on the bridge, looking at the sleepy river, with a dull pain in her heart and her eyes half-blinded with the rush of emotion that seemed to overwhelm her.
In a fortnight! In two short weeks! Not until this moment had she fully realized what she had done in promising to be Percy Levant’s wife; but now——! She leaned her head upon her hands, and tried to crush down the rebellious thoughts that rose within her. Tried to wipe out, as it were, the remembrance of Cecil Neville, which haunted and tortured her.
“I love him still!” she moaned. “I love him still, and I am to be another man’s wife in a fortnight! Oh, if I were only dead—if I were only lying at rest at the bottom of the river here! In a fortnight! Oh, what have I done, what have I done?” and she wrung her hands, wildly.
Then suddenly, with an effort, she fought down the mad remorse and misery, and, in a dull despair, murmured:
“What does it matter? Why should I not marry him—or any one else? What can Cecil Neville ever be to me, even if I were free? He will be the husband of Lady Grace; he has forgotten that such a person as Doris Marlowe ever existed; or, if he remembers me, recalls me as the girl who served to amuse him for a few days in the country. What a shame it is that I should give a thought to him who has been so base and mean, while this other, to whom I have pledged my word, is all that is good and true! Marry Percy Levant! Yes, I would marry him to-morrow if he asked me!” and, setting her teeth hard, she turned to leave the bridge.
As she did so, a tall, thin old man, with a white, wasted face, from which a pair of sharp gray eyes gleamed like cold steel, came onto the bridge, and she made way for him.
He was leaning on a stick, and, as he raised his hat in courtly acknowledgment, he let the stick slip from his thin, clawlike hands.
Doris stooped and picked it up, and, as she gave it to him and he was thanking her in Italian, his piercing eyes scanned her face with a cold earnestness.
Doris bowed and went on, but some impulse moved her to look back after she had gone a few yards, and she saw him leaning against the bridge, with his hands pressed to his heart, and his face deathly white.