“I? No. They hardly write to me,” said she, with a forlorn sense of loneliness. “But they were well, weren’t they?”
“My uncle was horribly cut up by—by your determination, Phillis.”
“I was afraid he might be sorry.”
She knew that what she dreaded was coming, and her heart beat wildly; but she said the words quite calmly, and as if they related to someone else. Jack crushed a flower in his hand, and leant forward.
“She was sorry, too,” he said in a low voice. “Can’t you think differently? I know I was the one to blame, but can’t you let me—”
She interrupted him with a hasty gesture.
“That subject is at an end between us; pray do not return to it.”
But that it was so unlike her, he could have sworn he detected a slight accent of scorn in her voice.
“Well, Phillis,” he said, getting up, “I daren’t do it, if you forbid me. I don’t suppose I’ve gone the way to work to make you believe what I want to say. Perhaps I’d better have held my tongue, as I intended. It was the seeing you with her, I suppose, and thinking that perhaps—however, if it is as you say, and the subject must be at an end, will you give me a kiss, Phillis, before we part?”
She covered her face with her hands, and drew back quickly and without a word to soften the gesture.