“No,” she murmured, drawing nearer to him.
He laughed softly, and pushed his hat from his brow with a half weary gesture. “It is this: That though wickedness may go unpunished, folly never does. A man may commit a crime—many—and pass through the world undetected and unpunished, but if he commit a folly, Nemesis follows and closes upon him at once. And the moral of this is——”
He stopped.
“That it is wiser to be wicked than foolish,” she said.
“Exactly!” he assented, with a strange smile.
Bertie and the two Penstones had passed them, and reached the turning to The Dell, and here Olivia and Faradeane overtook them.
“I don’t think I ought to go any farther,” he said, half-stopping; “your father has had enough of us to-night.”
“No?” she said. “Why?” She paused, half timidly. “Why should you go; it must be lonely at home.”
“It is lonely,” he said, with a smile half sad. “No one but I can tell how lonely.”
“Why do you——” she began, and then stopped again.