"Good-bye, Lina dear! At about five o'clock I will return and take you home."
"I may not be able to wait until then. Good-bye!"
How could he tell that her indifferent manner was only assumed, and that her woman's heart was throbbing with grief and vain regret? She could not even trust herself to return his look as he gazed down into her face, his own full of surprise and pain. She drew her fingers swiftly from the caressing clasp of his hand, lest his touch should unnerve her for the work before her, and she let him go from her presence thus, without one word or look to tell him that she loved him.
Wallace Armstrong noted the parting, and formed his own conclusions thereon. He would have given a good deal to win this girl from his cousin. Her beauty, her disdain, and something reminiscent in her face and voice at once piqued and fascinated him. So far as he was capable of loving a woman, he loved her, and he longed most ardently to humble her pride and to make her will subservient to his. He was nearly thirty-one, and his constitution was prematurely aged by his irregular method of life. Possibly he knew that he was on the downward road, and seized at the idea that he could be saved by the sacrifice of the love of a pure and beautiful girl. Certain it was that he definitely resolved, if the thing could be done, to win Laline from her allegiance to his cousin, either before or after her marriage. Pity and remorse were qualities as foreign to Wallace's nature, where his own selfish enjoyment was concerned, as reverence and gratitude; and on this very day of reconciliation and forgiveness, which was to herald a new era of reformation, when he unwillingly left his uncle and Laline to their tête-à-tête, he betook himself, not to the office, in which he had again been offered a position, but to one of his favourite drinking haunts, where he speedily made amends for his comparative abstinence at luncheon.
In Lorin's sitting-room a cheery fire was burning, and Laline drew old Mr. Wallace's arm-chair towards the blaze, while she herself stood with one hand on the mantelpiece and one foot on the fender, looking earnestly down into the glowing coals.
"What a slip of a girl you are, to be sure, my dear!" remarked Alexander Wallace, as he noticed the graceful but unduly slender outline of her figure in its severely-cut blue-serge gown. "It's time you had some one to look after you and make life pleasanter for you! And what is the exact day you have fixed for the wedding?"
She turned and faced him suddenly, very pale, with big tears gathering in her eyes.
"Mr. Wallace," she said, "I am going to hurt you dreadfully—but it hurts me even more. My marriage with your nephew Lorin can never take place!"
Alexander started from his seat and gazed at her blankly.
"Never take place?" he repeated slowly. "You are surely joking, my lassie! I thought you seemed a bit cold to the boy; but it's only some lovers' tiff, and you will make it up when you meet again. I am not too old to forget young folks' ways."