Cyril Mallow smiled as he saw that he was right, and that it was only a matter of time. He liked Sage Portlock, and he told himself that he loved her passionately, and that without her he should die, and then he entered into pecuniary calculations.
“The old man must leave her at least half of what he has, and every one in Lawford says he is well off, so that it will be a pleasant little bit of revenge to spend the old hunks’s money for the way in which he abused me. Then there is poor mamma’s money. That must come to me, so that we shall be pretty well off. Bah! it will all come right in time. But I hope Frank is not playing the fool about little Rue.”
After the stern encounter with the Churchwarden, and the angry words with his father, Cyril thought it prudent to keep away from Kilby Farm, and ceased to watch for Sage as she was going to or leaving school; but he rearranged his seat in the rectory pew, so that he could see her where she sat in church, became more regular than ever in his attendance, and sat through his father’s sermons gazing pensively at the young schoolmistress.
People said he was growing pale and thin, which was a fact easily explicable, for he smoked from morning to night, and the healthy brown of the last sea voyage was fading away consequent upon his indoor life.
“If I kick up a row I shall do no good,” he argued, “so I may as well wait. I could persuade her to run away with me, but then we should be confoundedly short of money till the old folks forgave us, and I’m sick of that sort of thing. No, I think the injured dodge is best, for it pays all round.”
He was quite right; and while he shut himself up with his brother in the room devoted to their personal use, read Bell’s Life in London, and sent communications to one or two betting men in town whenever he had the necessary funds at his disposal, everything was working steadily to the end he sought to gain.
His quiet acceptance, as it seemed to the Rector and Portlock, of the commands which he had received, gave him, in the eyes of the other interested parties, an injured, martyrlike air, and, though she did not meet him now, Sage’s thoughts were none the less busy about him. His every word had impressed her deeply, and day by day, in spite of her efforts to be true to her promise, she felt that she was falling more and more away.
This was plainly shown in her letters to Luke Ross, to whom she wrote weekly, hearing from him regularly in return. But he noted the gradual change in her communications. They grew shorter by degrees; less full of chatty little paragraphs about herself and her daily life. Still she did not fail to send to him once. It had become a habit—a duty—and while she did this she told herself that she was making a brave fight against her weak heart, and hiding the truth from Luke, little thinking that her notes laid her heart quite bare to the reader.
For it is a very strange thing how the feelings of a writer at the time of writing infuse themselves in the words. A note may contain only a thousand, and those thousand words relate certain matters, but from one writer they will seem to flow with affection, from another be calm, cool, and simply matter-of-fact. The sentences shall be almost the same, the words be very little varied, and yet, even without endearing expressions, one letter shall breathe and emanate affection, the other be friendliness alone.
So, by slow degrees, it was with Sage’s letters to her lover; and at first, as the idea stole upon him that she was growing colder, Luke Ross fought back the cruel thought, telling himself that he was wrong, and that hard study was souring his disposition, making him exacting and strange.