“Vindictive? You don’t know what I owe him, Dorothy. It is a bigger debt than I ever owed any one before, and I’d pay it if it took the last thing I have in the world.”
“It has taken the thing you valued most, hasn’t it?” said Dorothy, with heartfelt sympathy in voice and eyes. “Poor Isabel! It is a dreadful blow for her! And she is taking it so strangely.”
Antrim was properly mystified, but he got no farther than to say: “Isabel? I am afraid I don’t quite understand.”
“Surely she has told you,” said Dorothy, who could not imagine anything like duplicity on the part of her outspoken sister.
Now Isabel had told him but one thing of any considerable importance to a lover, and Antrim’s thought naturally reverted to that thing.
“Oh, yes,” he rejoined, trying to speak lightly. “She gave me my quittance for good and all a while back, but—” He was going on to add that it is a long lane that has no turning, when Dorothy interrupted:
“I knew she would tell you first! And now this dreadful thing has come between them. Harry, I believe it will kill her if she has to give him up now. She is acting so strangely that I fairly tremble for her reason.”
Antrim throttled a wild impulse to give place to madness and forced himself to say, as calmly as might be, “Then she has told you that—that she loves Brant?”
Dorothy decided on the spur of the moment that it was no time for half confidences.
“Yes; and that isn’t the worst of it. She sent him away because—because she didn’t know her own heart, I suppose. I told her he would come back; and now he never can. Isn’t it too pitiful!”