“And—and you believed her? You didn’t have sense enough in that thick head of yours to know that she was merely trying to save your face?”
“Oh, no; you’re off on the wrong foot altogether. She didn’t get that letter I wrote her from Chattanooga, and she hadn’t given me a chance to tell her about Richardia. It was perfectly straight. She has simply found the other man—the right man—and she is honest enough to say so.”
“Do you mean to say that you didn’t tell her anything about your crookedness down here?”
“Oh, yes; we talked about that later on, though, again, there were no names named. She jumped to the conclusion that my ‘crookedness’, as you call it, was with one of the pretty undergraduates at Highmount, and I let it go at that. There was no use of making a bad matter worse by dragging Richardia’s name into it.”
Carfax took a pacing turn up and down the room, broke it to go and stand for a full minute staring out of a window at Uncle William’s cook-house, and then faced about to say, almost pleadingly: “You are sure she meant it, Vance?”
“Of course she meant it. She wouldn’t tell me much about the other fellow, except to say that it was some one whom I knew, and who was too decent to try to break in while our engagement still held good.”
“And she—she really would give the—the other fellow a chance, if—if he had the nerve to ask for it?”
“It would be something better than ‘a chance’, I should say.”
Again Carfax took a pacing turn, coming back from it to drop into the chair opposite Tregarvon.
“Vance, I am the ‘other fellow,’” he said softly. “You didn’t suspect it, did you? It began last summer when we were at Lake Placid together. I thought it was all on my side of the house; I didn’t dream that she wasn’t in love with you in the—in the way she ought to have been. But——”