“But I am not going to have the gout,” protested the colonel, stoutly. “I am quite well, my dear; but the fact is—the fact is, I was thinking of a discovery I made this evening—a discovery about Anstruthers.”
“Hector?” exclaimed Georgie, half-unconsciously, and then turned her bright eyes upon the shining fender.
“Yes,” proceeded Colonel Esmond. “Hector himself. I believe I have found out what has changed him so—so deucedly, not to put too fine a point upon it—during the last four or five years. You remember what a frank, warm-hearted lad he was, at three-and-twenty, Jennie?” to Mrs. Esmond.
“Papa,” interposed Georgie, “do you really think he has changed for the worse? In his heart, I mean.”
“He has not changed for the better,” answered the colonel. “But his heart is all right, my dear.”
“I am sure,” said Georgie, a little piteously. “I am sure he is good at heart.”
“Of course he is,” said the colonel. “But he has altered very much, in many respects. And Jennie, my dear, I have discovered that the trouble was the one you hinted at, in the beginning. There was a woman in the case. A woman who treated him shamefully.”
“She must have been very heartless,” said Georgie. “Poor Hector!”
The colonel warmed up.
“She was shamefully heartless, she was disgracefully, unnaturally heartless! Such cold-blooded, selfish cruelty would have been unnatural in a mature woman, and she was nothing more than a school-girl, a mere child. I congratulate myself that I did not learn her name. The man who told me the story had not heard it. If I knew it, and should ever chance to meet her, by George!” with virtuous indignation, “I don’t see how a man of honor could remain in the same room with such a woman.”