"I shall say nothing, of course," says Joyce. "Why should I? It is nothing to me, though I am sorry for her."
Yet as she says this, a doubt arises in her mind as to whether she need be sorry. Is there a cousin in India? Could that big, jolly, lively girl, who had come into the conservatory with Beauclerk last night, with the light of triumph in her eyes, be the victim of an unhappy love affair? Should she write and ask her if there is a cousin in India? Oh, no, no! She could not do that! How horrible, how hateful to distrust him like this! What a detestable mind must be hers. And besides, why dwell so much upon it. Why not accept him as a pleasing acquaintance. One with whom to pass a pleasant hour now and then. Why ever again regard him as a possible lover!
A little shudder runs through her. At this moment it seems to her that she could never really have so regarded him. And yet only last night——
And now. What is it? Does she still doubt? Will that strange, curious, tormenting feeling that once she felt for him return no more. Is it gone forever? Oh! that it might be so!
CHAPTER XXII.
"So over violent, or over civil!" "A man so various."
"Dull looking day," says Dicky Browne, looking up from his broiled kidney to glare indignantly through the window at the gray sky.
"It can't be always May," says Beauclerk cheerfully, whose point it is to take ever a lenient view of things. Even to heaven itself he is kind, and holds out a helping hand.