"That's—fine of you!... Good-bye——"
Patricia ran down the three steps, and clanged the little gate behind her.
"And she is a jolly fine person," she reflected further, as she walked rapidly away from Pacific Villa; "but it was her fault, all the same, that they came to grief, and that his whole career was mucked up. Lord! sixteen years at that pitch of strain, in that beastly toadstool house, pretending all the time...." She vowed that she would make up to Gareth for this woman's hard unmerciful judgments. And again she murmured, as on entrance: "My poor man...."
"Good-bye. I'm going."
Gareth looked up in bewilderment at the sight of Kathleen, in her outdoor clothes, standing in the dining-room doorway.
"Going? Where?"
"Just going. You won't try to stop me this time, will you?"
"Yes; certainly I will. You can't walk out of the house in this—this haphazard fashion."
"You mean, that I should discuss it for weeks beforehand, and write all the luggage-labels twice over. That's not my way, Gareth. Besides, as was rightly observed by that big radiant young person with the green eyes, it's indecent, under the circumstances, for us to go on sharing ... our meals."