“You? Vance!”
The grim smile came again, and he said—though rather in shame than in malice: “It hurts a little, doesn’t it?—when it is the other way about. For nearly a week I have been thinking that you knew. I told you all about it, you know, in the letter I wrote last Sunday night in Chattanooga; the letter which seems to have gone astray. That is why I was so slow in getting your meaning: I was looking for you to dagger me the other way around, you know.”
Miss Wardwell was no longer embarrassed, but she was well-nigh tearful.
“I suppose it is one of those horridly pretty Southern girls in the school,” she said half-spitefully. “Have you——”
“No,” he hastened to say; “I have been almost as decent as the other fellow; the fellow you won’t name for me. I haven’t asked her to marry me.”
“And she?”
“She is going to marry a man old enough to be her father—if she doesn’t reconsider and marry a young donkey of a millionaire.”
Rucker, following an order which had been given him earlier in the day, was tooling the yellow car up the weed-grown carriage approach, coming to drive the two young men back to Coalville. Also, Carfax and Miss Birrell were returning from the posy-patch. Miss Wardwell stood up and put her hands into Tregarvon’s.
“I’m sorry and happy and miserable all in the same breath,” she said. “I shall be here for a few days. Papa and mamma are going over to the Shiloh battle-field after they leave Chattanooga, and I shall stay until they come back. You’ll come again, won’t you?”
He was able to smile down into the brown eyes of beseeching. The stabbed-vanity pain was passing—a little.