"Thank you so much for coming, Miss Bruce--Maud," said Tom passionately. "You never fail, and yet I always dread, somehow, that I shall be disappointed."
"I keep my word, Mr. Ryfe," answered the young lady, with perfect self-possession; "and I am quite as anxious as you can be, I assure you. I want so to know how we are getting on."
He showed less discouragement than might have been expected. Perhaps he was used to the sang-froid, perhaps he rather liked it, believing it, in his ignorance, a distinctive mark of class, not knowing--how should he?--that, once excited, these thoroughbred ones are, of all racers, the least amenable to restraint.
"I have bad news," he said tenderly. "Miss Bruce, I hardly like to tell you that I fear we cannot make our case enough to come into court. I took the opinion of the first man we have. I am sorry to say he gives it against us. I am not selfish," he added, with real emotion, "and I am sorry indeed, for your sake, dearest Miss Bruce."
He meant to have called her "Maud"; but the beautiful lips tightened, and the delicate eyebrows came down very straight and stern over the deep eyes in which he had learned to read his fate. He would wait for a better opportunity, he thought, of using the dear, familiar name.
She took small notice of his trouble.
"Has there been no mismanagement?" she asked, almost angrily; "no papers lost? no foul play? Have you done your best?"
"I have, indeed," he answered meekly. "After all, is it not for my own interest as much as yours? Are they not henceforth to be in common?"
She ignored the question altogether; she seemed to be thinking of something else. While they paced up and down a walk screened from the Square windows by trees and shrubs already clothed in the tender, quivering foliage of spring, she kept silence for several seconds, looking straight before her with a sterner expression than he could yet remember to have seen on the face he adored. Presently she spoke in a hard, determined voice--
"I am disappointed. Yes, Mr. Ryfe, I don't mind owning I am bitterly and grievously disappointed. There, I suppose it's not your fault, so you needn't look black about it; and I dare say you did the best you could afford at the price. Well, I don't want to hurt your feelings--your very best, then. And yet it seems very odd--you were so confident at first. Of course if the thing's really gone, and there's no chance left, it's folly to think about it. But what a future to lose--what a future to lose! Mr. Ryfe, I can't stay with Aunt Agatha--I can't and I won't! How she could ever find anybody to marry her! Mr. Ryfe, speak to me. What had I better do?"