Flavia grasped the heavy curtain, gazing at him in an utter confusion of thought that amounted to actual giddiness.
"I—I sent away Mr. Gerard?" she marvelled.
"Who else? Or if you accepted him, why was I not told?"
"Will you tell me what you mean?" she asked brokenly.
"Mean? I mean that the last time I saw Allan Gerard alone, on the day I met you and Corrie driving home together, he asked my permission to propose to you. I rather guess that hour with him didn't make me very easy on Corrie, although I was given no cause to be otherwise by Gerard. Gerard said frankly that he wouldn't have offered you such a wreck as he felt himself, much as he loved you, if he had not gone so far before he was hurt that he had no right to leave in silence. He said that as a matter of honorable justice he must lay the decision before you and abide by your will. Very quiet, he was—I told him that I would rather give you to him than to any other man on earth, and I meant it."
The room blurred before Flavia's dilated eyes.
"You never told me! Papa, you never told me!"
The passionate cry of grief brought Mr. Rose to his feet.
"Told you? Gerard was to tell you. I wanted to carry him home with me that afternoon, but he refused. In fact, he was not fit, nor I either, to stand any more sentiment just then. He said he would write and ask you to see him, if you cared to have him speak or come back at all. That trip West he had to take. Didn't he write?"
She saw the softly-lighted little room at home where Jack Rupert had come to her, and Isabel's suffused, desperate face as she snatched the letter from its owner. And as a pendant picture she saw the bleak, solitary railway station in the gray December morning, where Gerard, ill and reft of his splendid strength, had waited alone for the girl who did not come.