“Hush! I will not hear you speak like that, Hendon, my own darling brother! For Janet’s sake—”
“She’s nothing to me now. I was thrown over for some other fellow.”
“How dare you, sir! You know it is not true! Dear Janet! Working daily like a slave, and offering me her hard earnings when we were so pressed.”
“Did she—did she?” cried Hendon excitedly, and with his pale face flushing up.
“There,” cried Richmond half-laughingly, half-scornfully, “confess, sir, that a lying spirit was on your lips. Say you believe that of Janet and that you do not still love her, if you dare!”
Hendon Chartley let his head fall into his hands, and bent down, with his shoulders heaving with the emotion he could not conceal, while his sister bent over him and laid her hand upon his head.
He started up at her touch, seized and kissed her hand, and then, going to the side of the room, he laid his arm against the panel and his brow upon it, to stand talking there.
“I can’t help it, Rich dear,” he groaned; “I feel like a brute beast sometimes, and as if I can never look her in the face again. I’ve drunk; I’ve gone wild in a kind of despair; and Poynter seems to have been always by me to egg me on, and get me under his thumb.”
“My own brother!”
“Don’t touch me, dear. I can’t stop here. I’ll do as Mark Heath did, and if Janet’ll wait, perhaps some day I may come back to her a better man, and she may forgive me.”