'It is strange that she should leave in this way,' answered Done impatiently.
'There's nothing strange in it, man; it's just natural. You never understood how much that girl cared for you, Jimmy. If you did, perhaps you would know what it meant for her to be working herself to a ghost over your bed there while you babbled of love to another woman.'
'I did?'
'Did you? Night and day. It was Lucy, Lucy, Lucy—always Lucy. Lucy with the brown hair and the beautiful eyes—Lucy the pure, and sweet, and good. Never a word of Joy—never the smallest word of the woman who was beating the devil off you, you blackguard!'
'But I was delirious! Surely——'
'True, you were wandering; but it's only when a man's mad or drunk that one gets the truth out of him about women. "There's not a thought of me left in his heart, Mary!" said the poor girl.'
'She was wrong—wrong!' he protested.
'Not a bit, boy! 'Twas the pure girl had all your soul. Heavens! and how you rubbed it in about her purity and goodness! Mother of us! let a man be so infernally bad that the very fiend sniffs at him, but he'll bargain with the impudence of an archangel for the pure girl.'
'And she went away for this?'
'Sure enough. Aurora's the sort to hide her hurts. When she can't fight over them, she'll not cry a whimper.'