"Fooling!" he repeated; "fooling! Do you mean to affirm that you have been fooling me all the time? Explain yourself, Mistress Carew. Have you found a new sweetheart, or is this but a sorry jest to try the temper of the old?"
She bowed her head in assent. If she made him angry, she thought it would be easier to effect a rupture. And yet, to part from him unkindly! ah! if she could but fall down then and there, tell him the truth, and die!
He felt utterly perplexed, astounded, incredulous, yet wounded to the very heart. It seemed so impossible she should have ceased to care for him, even while the announcement was on her very lips. Stiffly, and with an offended air, extremely unlike the frank and kindly bearing that was one of John Garnet's characteristics, he made a low bow, and observed quietly:
"No lady need fear persecution from me. Forgive my repeating to you, Mistress Carew, that I loved you dearly, and believed you cared for me in return."
"I know it," she said, and but for a choking sensation in her throat would have added something more.
"I have deceived myself strangely, it seems," he continued, trying to meet her eyes, which she kept averted from his face. "Nevertheless, I think I am entitled to demand the cause of this sudden dismissal. I should not like to lose my respect for you, Mistress Carew, even though I must try to forget my own unreasonable love."
Still that catching in the throat. She loosened the black velvet band round her neck, before she could answer.
"Master Garnet," she said, "it is not good for you to be here. You ought never to have come. I blame myself you have not sooner gone away. Believe me, the air of Porlock means death. If you—you ever cared for me, as you say, depart at once, to-day, this very hour, and put the blue sea between us, for my sake!"
"For your sake?" This was surely a new experience of the sex, thought John Garnet; was ever woman so incomprehensible? Was ever woman so lovely, and so beloved?