She shook her head in answer.
“There’ll never be any chance for any one else,” she repeated gravely.
He looked at her a moment longer, his face growing rather pale. Once more he jingled his keys in his pocket, as he turned his head away.
“Well—I’m sorry,” he said. “Excuse me if I spoke—you see I didn’t know.”
There was a tone with the commonplace words that took them straight to Katharine’s heart. She saw how the strong, simple, uneloquent man was suffering, and she knew that she should never have come to the house.
“I’m more sorry—and more ashamed—than you can guess,” she said, and with bent head she left him standing by the fireplace, and went to her room.
He did not move for a long time after she had gone, but stood still, his face changing, though little, from time to time, with his thoughts. He jingled his keys meditatively in his pocket every now and then. At last he sighed and uttered one monosyllable, solemnly and without undue emphasis.
“Damn.”
Then he shook his big shoulders, and got his hat and went for a solitary stroll, eastwards in the direction of the river.
But Katharine had not such powerful monosyllables at her command, and she suddenly felt very much ashamed of herself, as she shut the door of her room and looked about, with a vague idea that she ought to go away at once. It was not as though she had not been warned of what might happen, nor as though she had been forced into the situation against her will. She had deliberately chosen to come to the Brights’ rather than to go anywhere else, and had obliged John Ralston to let her do so when she had been with him in the carriage. If she ever told him what had just happened he would have in his power one of those weapons which, in a small way, humanity keenly dreads, to wit, the power to say “I told you so.” It is not easy to explain the sense of utter humiliation which most of us feel—though we jest about it—when the warning of another proves to have been well founded.