“Esmeralda, you must not stay. You really must not! There is so much to do still.”
“Yes, yes; we will go,” said Trafford. He kissed Esmeralda’s hand. She turned, as she left the room, and looked at both men. There was the same appealing expression in her eyes as they rested upon Trafford.
“This is a strange coincidence,” he said, as the two men left the house.
“Yes; isn’t it?” assented Norman, with a laugh that sounded awful in his own ears. The houses seemed whirling round him, the sky pressing down upon his head. Trafford going to marry Esmeralda! Trafford going to marry Esmeralda! The sentence kept repeating itself in his brain in a maddening fashion.
“To think that you and she should be old friends!” said Trafford, with a laugh. There was not an atom of suspicion in his mind. “You called her Esmeralda, didn’t you?”
“Did I?” said poor Norman. “Yes; I think I did. It—it slipped out in the moment of surprise.” Trafford must never know that Esmeralda was the girl he had loved and could not forget. “You see, out in the wilds there, people soon get to calling each other by their Christian names. It’s—it’s not so formal, and all that, in a diggers’ camp.”
“No; I suppose not!” said Trafford. “I am very glad that you are friends already. By the way, old man, you forgot, in the excitement of your surprise, to give Esmeralda that little present.”
“Yes; so I did,” said Norman, with a smile that seemed to cost him a broken heart. “Stupid of me, wasn’t it? I’ll give it to her later on!”