“You have given one of the reasons, Harry; and some day, when you are not expecting it, I may hold a looking-glass before you and show you the other. You ask me what marrying love is: it is what I have seen, more than once, in your eyes ... and you were not looking at me. Let us get in and drive somewhere else. I don’t believe I shall ever want to come back to this place again.”
As it chanced, it was at the precise moment when Bromley was putting his companion into the buggy preparatory to continuing the afternoon drive, that Philip was descending from a hired hack before a door that was seldom opened for callers in the daytime. It was Madam Blanche herself, a woman who still retained much of what had once been the beauty and charm of a riant, joyous girlhood, who admitted him. He stated his errand briefly.
“I have come for Mona—the girl you call ‘Little Irish.’ Is she ready to go with me?”
“Ready? Why, she’s gone!”
“Gone?—gone where?”
“She wouldn’t tell me where she was going; wouldn’t give me even a hint. But I guess she took one of the morning trains. She left early enough to catch any one of ’em. She said you’d given her the money to go with.”
“No,” he denied soberly; “I gave her money so that she could pay you whatever she might be owing you, and get ready to marry me.”
The woman collapsed into the nearest chair.
“Marry you? Why, my dear man! What do you think she’s made of? She’s too good a girl to do anything like that!”
“Too good?” he queried vaguely.