“Heart’s-ease be ——,” began Anstruthers, roughly, but he checked himself in time. “She is the sort of a woman to wear heart’s-ease!” he added, with a sardonic laugh. “She ought to wear heart’s-ease, and violets, and lilies, and snowdrops, and wild roses in the bud,” with a more bitter laugh for each flower he named. “Such fresh, innocent things suit women of her stamp.”
“I say,” said Lyon, staring at his sneering face, amazedly, “what is the matter? You talk as if you had a spite against her. What’s up?”
Anstruther’s sneer only seemed to deepen in its intensity.
“A spite!” he echoed. “What is the matter? Oh, nothing—nothing of any consequence. Only I wish she had given her heart’s-ease to me, or I wish you would give it to me, that I might show you what I advise you to do with the pretty things such creatures give you. Toss it into the fire, old fellow, and let it scorch, and blacken, and writhe, as if it was a living thing in torment. Or fling it on the ground, and set your heel upon it, and grind it out of sight.”
“I don’t see what good that would do,” said Lyon, coming to the mantelpiece, and taking down his meerschaum. “You are a queer fellow, Anstruthers. I did not think you knew the girl.”
“I know her?” with a fresh sneer. “I know her well enough.”
“By Jove!” exclaimed Lyon, suddenly, as if a thought had struck him. “Then she did mean something.”
“She generally means something,” returned the other. “Such women invariably do—they mean mischief.”
“She generally does when she laughs in that way,” Lyon proceeded, incautiously. “She is generally laughing at a man, instead of with him, as she pretends to be. And when she laughed, this evening, and looked in that odd style at you, I thought there was something wrong.”
Anstruthers turned white, the dead white of suppressed passion.