"How he must have suffered," she says to herself, "to have changed like this!" Masterful Power, who used always to take obedience for granted! There is something pitiful in it that goes straight to the tender woman's heart, loyal to its old traditions.
As she was putting the paper into the bosom of her dress, the drawing-room door opens, and Brian Beresford enters, followed by her father. Brian's eyes at once seek her where she stands beside the open window, her fingers playing nervously with the tell-tale scrap of paper.
His face darkens at once, and she knows that he has seen and understood.
CHAPTER IX.
Never has time passed so slowly to Honor Blake. All the morning she goes about her work with a listless preoccupied air that could not fail to attract attention if there were any one to heed the girl or her moods.
Perhaps Brian Beresford heeds them; but Honor never gives a thought to him. She would be glad if he would go away and leave her to herself; but since he makes no such offer, she puts up with him.
And now, in the late afternoon, she sits down at the piano, more to pass the time than to amuse their guest. In truth, as she plays she forgets him altogether. The music, now low and sweet, now wild and martial, soothes her and brings back some of her lost nerve.
Brian Beresford, looking and listening, frowns, and then sighs. She is an enigma to him, this stately, contradictory Irish girl, with her moods and her prejudices, and, above all, her reserve. He has met no one quite like her. The women of his world are of a totally different type—he can understand them easily; but Honor he cannot understand.
He feels his heart soften as he looks at her. He is proud, and it has jarred upon his pride terribly that a man like Power Magill should have been preferred to him.
"And the chances are, now the fellow is in disgrace, she will cling to him all the closer," he says to himself bitterly. He does not care to own it, but in his heart he is savagely jealous of Power Magill.