"No; stay where you are; I believe you. When do you sail?"
"In a week—next Tuesday."
Dick breathed more freely. Here was an extenuating circumstance of the broken compact. On the whole, Dick was glad to find one.
"Go on," said Dick, in a slightly less hostile tone: "tell me the rest, and what it was that induced you to come up here."
"Surely you can see the rest for yourself? Surely you can put yourself in my place at this point? I own that hearing you were not to be of the party finally induced me to come—I thought you would not hear of it till afterwards; but I came to bid my friends good-bye! to get one more glimpse of a kind of life I had never seen before and shall never see again! for one more week in a pure atmosphere."
"Oh! not to make up to Miss Bristo, then?"
Blunt though the words were, each one was a self-inflicted stab to the heart of the man that spoke them.
"No!" cried Miles, and his voice was turned suddenly hoarse; "no, before Heaven!"
"If I believed it was that, I think I should pull this trigger on the spot."
"It is not," cried Miles; "I swear it is not," he whispered.