“I suppose,” she said to Clifford, as soon as he came up, “you have come to say good-by, you and your friends, before you go back to town?”
She had remembered the date he had given her for that event, then. This was a ray of consolation, but she gave him no other. She was cold, reserved, almost hard. He felt so angry with her for her contemptuous disregard of his feelings that he thought for the moment that his passion was extinguished by it. However, she unbent so far as to invite them all in to tea, and the three young men were much puzzled as to which of them it was who had procured them this favor. Conybeare seemed to be, on the whole, the one to whom she talked the most; Clifford was, without any doubt, the one of whom she took the least notice.
The meal, on the whole, was a pleasant one, although Claris himself was more taciturn than he had been on that unlucky day when he and Nell and Clifford had spent such a merry hour in the little sitting-room.
Now the weather had changed; the autumn winds were whistling about the little inn, and the blue sea had become a dark-gray line, flecked with white crests. There was a fire in the little grate, and it was when Otto Conybeare moved quickly forward to poke it for Nell that the incident occurred which was to throw a shadow over the meeting.
In passing a side-table upon which stood a wicker work-basket, Otto dragged the cloth off, and brought the basket and all the rest of the things on the table with a crash to the floor. Willie, who was near him, went down on his knees with apologies for Otto’s clumsiness.
“He thinks it’s manly, you know, to show a contemptuous indifference to such feminine trifles. A sure sign of genius, you know, Miss Claris, and you must excuse it, as it’s the only sign he’s got. Oh, and just look at the pretty things he’s been trampling under his great intellectual feet!”
And Willie held up to the astonished gaze of the rest a glittering jewel which sparkled in the fire-light.
For a moment there was an oppressive silence. Then Nell, pale and agitated, snatched it from him with fingers so unsteady that the trinket fell to the floor again. It was Clifford who picked it up this time and gave it to the girl without a word. Nell would have put it back into her basket, but George Claris, on whom the appalled silence of the young men had not been lost, told his niece in a rough tone to give it to him.
“What is the thing?” he asked, sharply.
“Only one of a pair of old-fashioned earrings, uncle,” answered Nell, with emotion, which no efforts on her part could hide.