“He was not my father.”
That excuse, then, no longer availed him. He could no longer—and yet, and yet. The more he thought, the more difficult he found it to accept the hopelessness of the case or make up his mind to take himself out of Evelyn’s life. Yet that, he confidently believed, he would instantly do if he could satisfy himself that it was not already too late for Evelyn herself to welcome such an outcome.
One morning he opened his mind to Dorothy on the subject, and got a moral castigation for his pains. The gear that had restrained his movements had been completely removed by that time, and Kilgariff was contemplating an almost immediate return to his post on the lines at Petersburg.
“I am sorely troubled, Dorothy,” he began. “I am going away two or three days hence, and I wish I could go without seeing Evelyn again.”
“Oh, I can easily manage that,” answered she, with a composure and a commonplaceness of tone which seemed inscrutable to her companion. She took his remark quite as a matter of course, treating it as she might had he merely said:—
“I should like to leave my horse here.”
It was not an easy conversational situation from which to find a way out. Obviously it was for him to make the next remark, and he could not think what it should be. Possibly Dorothy intended that he should be perplexed. At any rate, she manifestly did not intend to help him out of his difficulty.
Presently he found the way out of it for himself—the only way that Dorothy would have tolerated. That is to say, he became perfectly frank with her.
“I want to talk with you about that,” he said, “if I may. I am much troubled; and while I have no right to call upon you for any sort of help, I feel that it may clear my mind simply to tell you all about the matter.”