“I couldn’t stay away when I knew you were ill, Lyme, dear!” The voice was honeyed sweet now.
“What had that to do with it?” The tone was almost vicious. “You wrote that we had grown apart, and it was true. You are engaged to another man.”
“Well, can’t I change my mind?” The tone was playful, kittenish. It smote Lyman Gage’s memory that he had been wont to call it teasing and enjoy it in her once upon a time.
“You’ve changed your mind once too often!” The sick man’s voice was tense in his weakness, and his brow was dark.
“Why, Lyme Gage! I think you are horrid!” cried the girl with a hint of indignant tears in her voice. “Here I come a long journey to see you when you’re sick; and you meet me that way, and taunt me. It’s not like you. You don’t seem a bit glad to see me! Perhaps there’s some one else.” The voice had a taunt in it now, and an assurance that expected to win out in the end, no matter to what she might have to descend to gain her point.
But she had reckoned without knowledge, for Lyman Gage remembered the picture he had torn to bits in the dying light of the sunset and trampled in the road; those same brilliant eyes, that soft tinted cheek, those painted lips, had smiled impudently up to him that way as he had ground them beneath his heel; and this was GIRL, his natural enemy, who would play with him at her pleasure, and toss him away when he was no longer profitable to her, expecting to find him ready at a word again when circumstances changed. He straightened up with sudden strength, and caught her words with a kind of joyful triumph.
“Yes, there is some one else! Mary! Mary Amber!”
Mary Amber, trying not to hear, had caught her name, heard the sound in his voice like to the little chick that calls its mother when the hawk appears; and suddenly her fear vanished. She turned, and walked with steady step and bright eyes straight into the spare bedroom, a smile upon her lips and a rose upon her cheek that needed no cosmetics to enhance its beauty.
“Did you call me—Lyman?” she said, looking straight at him with rescue in her eyes.
He put out his hand to her, and she went and stood by the bed over across from the visitor, who had turned and was staring amazedly, insolently at her now.