There was no mistaking the look of glad surprise and love that suddenly broke over his countenance. Rhoda gazed at him in perplexity and instinctively pressed one hand against her heart, as if to keep down the responsive love that was trying to leap upward, as she said to herself, “Charlotte’s husband! Charlotte’s husband!”
Still moving backward, away from him, as he followed her across the room exclaiming again, “Sweetheart, did you ask me to come?” her bewildered, apprehensive thought sprang to the conclusion that she must make him be true to Charlotte, that she must not let him betray the “little sister.”
“Charlotte—” she ejaculated—“your engagement—I wrote to wish you happiness!”
He stopped short and stared at her with puzzled eyes. “What under heaven do you mean?”
“Why, your engagement to my sister! Aren’t you going to marry Charlotte?”
“Assuredly, I’m not!” was his quick and emphatic answer.
“Have you—have you—broken it off, then—so soon?” She was moving her trembling hands over each other, unable to keep them still, and holding her face half averted, afraid to look at him save in brief glances, lest her eyes might betray the love that was swelling in her heart.
“You are talking in puzzles, Rhoda! I’ve never had the faintest desire to marry Charlotte, or anybody but you.”
Her face dropped lower and her bosom heaved. What could it all mean? Had they been deceiving her? And why? “She said—that is—I understood—” she stumbled. Then he broke in upon her embarrassed bewilderment.
“She didn’t say she was going to marry me, did she? Lloyd Corey is the happy man. It was love at first sight, of the most violent sort, with him, and he would take nothing but an outright ‘yes’ for his answer, and that inside of two weeks. It was a pretty little love comedy, and I wished a hundred times that you were there to watch it with me.”