"Pshaw!" says Kelly. Rising with a vehemence foreign to him, he crosses to where Ulic Ronayne is standing alone.
CHAPTER XXII.
How Olga drowns a faithful servant—How Mr. Kelly conjures up a ghost—And how Monica, beneath the mystic moonbeams, grants the gift she first denies.
"Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" he says, lightly, laying his hand on Ulic's shoulder. The latter turns to him with a bright smile that renders his handsome face quite beautiful. Seeing its charm, Kelly asks himself, in half-angry fashion, how Olga can possibly hesitate for one moment between him and Rossmoyne. "But they are all alike heartless," he decides, bitterly.
"I am feeling neither pale nor wan," says Ronayne, still smiling. "It must be the moon, if anything. Look here, Kelly, something to-night has told me that it will all come right in the end. I shall gain her against the heaviest odds."
"If you mean Rossmoyne, he's the heaviest mortal I know," says Kelly.
"Well, he isn't suited to her, is he?" There is a strange excitement in Ronayne's manner. "Putting me out of the question altogether, I don't believe he could make her happy. If I thought he could, of course I should then go away somewhere, and find contentment in the thought of hers; but——you don't think she would do well to marry him do you Kelly?" He has controlled his features to an almost marvellous calm, but the agony of his question in his eyes cannot be hid.
"I think the woman who could even hesitate between you and him must be a fool and worse," says Kelly, whose temper is not his own to-night. "He is a pedantic ass, more in love with himself than he can ever be with anything else. While you——Look here, Ronayne; I wonder if any woman is worth it."
"Oh, she is," says Ronayne, with tender conviction. "I don't think she is at all like other people; do you? There's something different—something special—about her."