“All right, I’ll not,” said Archie. “Only, you see, I thought that you wouldn’t mind now, as everyone says that she’s going to marry Airey, the M.P. for some place or other. I knew that you’d be glad to hear that I’d fired out the Legitimate.”
“So I am—very glad.”
Archie was off, having abandoned as futile his well-meant attempts to balance the quill on the toe first of one boot, then of the other.
He was off, and Harold was standing at the window, watching him gathering up his reins and sending his horses at a pretty fair pace into the square.
It had fallen—the blow had fallen. She was going to marry Edmund Airey.
Could he blame her?
He felt that he had treated her with a baseness that deserved the severest punishment—such punishment as was now in her power to inflict. She had trusted him with all her heart—all her soul. She had given herself up to him freely, and he had made her the victim of a fraud. That was how he had repaid her for her trustfulness.
He did not stir from the window for hours. He thought of her without any bitterness—all his bitterness was divided between the thoughts of his own cruelty and the thoughts of Edmund Airey’s cleverness. He did not know which was the more contemptible; but the conclusion to which he came, after devoting some time to the consideration of the question of the relative contemptibility of the two, was that, on the whole, Edmund Airey’s cleverness was the more abhorrent.
But Archie Brown, after leaving St. James’s, drove with his customary rapidity to Connaught Square, to tell of his achievement to Norah.
Miss Innisfail, while fully recognizing the personal obligations of Archie to the Shakesperian drama, had agreed with her father that this devotion should not be an absorbing one. She had had a hint or two that it absorbed a good deal of money, and though she had been assured by Archie that no one could say a word against Mrs. Mowbray’s character, yet, like Harold—perhaps even better than Harold—she knew that Mrs. Mowbray was an extremely well-dressed woman. She listened with interest to Archie’s account of how he had accomplished that process of “firing out” in regard to the Legitimate artists; and when he had told her all, she could not help wondering if Mrs. Mowbray would be quite as well dressed in the future as she had been in the past.