“Yes; I got them this morning.”
“Anything from—er—from Elizabeth yet?”
“Not yet; no.”
Carfax hesitated a moment and then interested himself sympathetically—or seemed to. “I hope you didn’t say too much—or too little—in that confession of yours last Sunday night, Vance; in the letter you sent from Chattanooga.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I suppose I am, as you might say—er—well, I’m a sort of an accessory before the fact, don’t you think? I can’t forget that it was I who clubbed you into the proper frame of mind.”
“You needn’t worry; you’re safely out of it,” declared the confessor, with a laugh which was only half good-natured. “I gave you your just due: told her that I owed you my soul’s salvation; which you had safely clinched against any backsliding by asking Richardia to marry you.”
For a moment there was a silence like that which precedes the crash of summer thunder. Then, in a still, small voice, Carfax said: “You told her that, did you? You gave her to understand that, right off the bat, and merely in passing, as it were, I had carelessly determined to marry your temptation out of your way? There was only one mistake made in your education, Vance; the person who first taught you to put pen to paper ought to have been instantly hanged, drawn and quartered. I—I—” but here, apparently, speech failed him, and he turned abruptly to walk rapidly away toward Highmount, leaving Tregarvon standing, half-remorseful and wholly bewildered, in the middle of the road.
The bewilderment went with the too highly educated one a good part of the way down to Coalville, and it certainly would have been increased if he could have known that, five minutes after he had turned the first curve in the winding pike below Highmount, the car which had been so lately reported out of commission had been mysteriously restored to a state of usefulness; that, with a man and a woman in the driving-seat, it had whisked through the campus portal, cut a perilous quarter-circle at speed in the piked roadway, and had vanished in a thick cloud of limestone dust to the westward, leaving Mrs. Caswell’s dinner to wait for its return.