“Oh, Owen! I thought you’d forgiven me—I thought you didn’t mind, so very much, after all,” she cried in dismay.
“I don’t mind in the least,” Quentillian told her desperately. “But it’s a false position altogether, and I want to be out of it.”
“Of course you do, it was very selfish of me to want to keep you. Only somehow Father is less—dreadful—when you’re there, Owen. But he’s forgiven me,” her tears came falling fast, “and I’m going out with George when he sails, at the beginning of next week. We shall be married very, very quietly, on Saturday.”
“I’m very glad to hear it. Indeed I am, Val. I’m sure he’s a good fellow, and I hope he’ll make you very happy.”
She was crying too much to speak, as he went away from her.
And Quentillian, definitely, could tell himself that he had no regrets in relinquishing Valeria.
Her warm emotionalism had not been without its appeal, but he had no liking for tears at a crisis, nor indeed for a crisis at all. His mind reverted to Lucilla’s matter-of-fact fashion of dealing with the crucial instances of life at St. Gwenllian, and theoretically, he met her attitude with applause. But he also remembered that he had not found her sympathetic, upon the preceding evening.
Impartially, he acknowledged with a rueful smile, his own exactingness.
He must go, and decided that it should be to London. As for Stear, he would face it later. The thought of Stear, and the loneliness there, brought the realest sense of loss to him that he had yet experienced over the defection of Valeria.
He had thought to hear her laughter there, to see the apricot bloom on her lovely face, her children growing up there.