“It’s an insult to her,” he said indignantly. “Bless her grand, true, sweet, innocent heart! She never thinks of him but as the good friend he is. She will never think of any one but that rascal. Good heavens! what a fate for her! What a woman to have won!”
The thought so moved him that he paced his little bed-room for some time uneasily.
“As for that fellow Bayle,” he cried, “I see through him. He means to marry my sweet little flower Julie. Hah!”
He sat down smiling, as if there was a pleasant fragrance in the very thought of the fair young girl that refreshed him, and sent him into a dreamy state full of visions of youth and innocence.
“I don’t blame him,” he said, after a pause. “I should do the same if I were his age. Yes,” he said firmly, and as if to crush down some offered opposition, “even if she be a convict’s daughter. It is not her fault. We do not mark out our own paths.”
Again, another night, and Sir Gordon arrested himself several times over in the act of spoiling his carefully-trimmed nails by nibbling them—a somewhat painful operation—with his false teeth.
“It’s time I died; I honestly believe it’s time I died,” he said testily. “When a man has grown to an age in which he spends his days suspecting the motives of his fellow-creatures—hah! of his best friends—it’s time he died, for every year he lives makes him worse—gives him more to answer for.”
“Poor Bayle!” he continued, shaking hands with himself, “he looks upon each of those two women as something holy.”
“No,” he mused, “that does not express it; there’s something too fatherly, too brotherly. No, that’s not it. Too friendly; I suppose that’s it; but friendship seems such a weak, pitiful word to express his feelings towards them.”
“Christie Bayle, my dear friend,” he said aloud, as he rose and gazed straight before him, “I ask your pardon; and—heaven helping me—I’ll never suspect you again.”