“Don’t talk nonsense, Mr. Elshaw, please. And don’t say you are sorry. For I know you are sorry for nobody but her. Miss Biron is one of those persons who attract sympathy; I am not. But you can spare yourself the trouble of pretending.” She drew herself up, and hastily wiped her eyes. “I know what to do. I shall go back to my father’s house, and I shall have nothing more to do with him. I am not going to break my heart over an unprincipled man, or over a creature like this Claire Biron.”
Bram offered no remonstrance. He knew that he ought to be sorry for this poor little woman, whose only and most venial fault had been a conviction that she possessed the power to “reform” the man she married. Unhappily, it was true, as she said, that she was not one of those persons who attract sympathy. Her hard, dry, snappish manner, the shrewish light in her blue eyes, repelled him as they had repelled Christian himself. And Bram, though far from excusing or forgiving Christian, felt that he understood how impossible it would have been for a man of his easy, genial temperament to be even fairly, conventionally happy with a nature so antipathetic to his own.
In silence, in sorrow, he withdrew, with an added burden to bear, the burden of what was near to absolute certainty, of extinguished hope.
CHAPTER XVI. THE PANGS OF DESPISED LOVE.
The farmhouse looked desolate in the dusk of the November evening when Bram, in fulfilment of his promise to Theodore, crossed the farmyard to the back door and tapped at it lightly.
It was opened by Joan, who looked as if she had been interrupted in the middle of “a good cry.”
“Ay, coom in, sir,” said she, “coom in. But you’ll find no company here now.”
“Isn’t Mr. Biron back yet?”