"It is Digby," she answered, suppressing a rising sob. "It is all dreadfully complicated. He is very unhappy at my being engaged to you. It—it seems that he wanted me himself."
Paul smiled broadly. The next moment he was grave enough.
"What right had he to say such things to you—now? I must ask him to explain himself," he rejoined.
Hazel could divine from the energy with which he spoke that Paul was angry.
"If you want to fight," she said, a little nervous tremor running through her, "you will have to wait. He is too weak just now, he—he had to lean against a tree to talk. But oh, you would not be so unkind, would you? He is so unhappy," she added beseechingly.
"No, no," Paul hastened to reassure her. "I don't want to fight the poor fellow. But he ought to have been man enough not to have troubled you, Hazel."
"He was so unreasonable," she went on. "I tried to comfort him, and he told me not to tantalise him with cruel words—cruel he called them."
Hazel raised her head a moment in order to see what Paul thought of such perverseness. Paul, who made a very shrewd guess at the nature of Hazel's "comforting," hurriedly raised his hand and stroked his moustache. Hazel's head hastily resumed its former position, after one brief glance.
"But he was very manly," she pursued earnestly, anxious to do poor Digby justice. "I have never known him so—so nice as he was just at the end. He—he said he should get over it soon," she added, more cheerfully, "but—but he does not seem to want to live with us."
"What?" Paul cried, with such vehemence that Hazel jumped. "What?"