“Elizabeth!”
She nodded, soberly and looked away from him. “Yes; it is true; and I had to come and tell you. You may despise me; it is your privilege.”
Tregarvon got up and took the necessary step to the veranda end which gave him the view into the rearward flower-garden. They were there, Carfax and Richardia, bending together over the chrysanthemums. When he turned back to face his cousin he was smiling grimly.
“As our cattle-ranching cousin in the West would say, you mustn’t ‘rawhide’ yourself too severely, Elizabeth. Leaving the dollars out of it—and I’ll find a way to leave them out if I have to throw them to the birds—I’m getting about what I deserve; which is the glad hand all around the block.”
“You are bitter, and I can’t blame you,” she said, with something alarmingly like a sob at the catching of her breath. “But really, at the very bottom of it all, you don’t care so very much, do you, Vance?”
“Don’t I? I’d be a mighty good specimen of the superman if I didn’t care. Who is this fellow who, coming after me, is preferred before me?”
“I—I can’t tell you that.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because—oh, you are perfectly savage with me!—because he has had no right to speak, nor I to listen. He hasn’t spoken; he may never speak. But that doesn’t make any difference.”
“No,” said Tregarvon wearily; “nothing makes any difference now. But I told you a moment ago not to reproach yourself too bitterly. I am in precisely the same sort of a boat myself, Elizabeth—without your good hope of getting ashore.”