She felt a dreadful choking in her throat again. It seemed to be closely connected with another peculiar sensation, as if her heart had turned into a lump of lead. In another minute she knew that she should break down, which would be humiliating beyond words. She started up from her cushions with a fierce attempt to keep a grip upon herself.
“I know you’re very happy,” she breathed, “and I’m very glad. But really I—I’m not at all sentimental to-night. I’m afraid a headache does not make one sympathetic.”
But she could not get past him; Anthony’s stalwart figure barred the way. His strong hands put her gently back among the cushions. She turned her head away, fighting hard for that thing she could not keep—her self-control.
“Is it really a headache?” asked the low voice in her ear. “Just a headache? Not by any chance—a heartache, Juliet?”
“Anthony Robeson!” she cried, but guardedly, lest the open window betray her. “What do you mean? You say very strange things. Why should I have a heartache? Because you are marrying the girl you love? How often have I begged you to go and find her? Do you think I would have done all this for her—and you—if I had cared?”
She tried to look defiantly into his eyes—those fine eyes of his which were watching her so intently—tried to meet them steadily with her own lovely, tear-stained ones—and failed. Swiftly an intense colour dyed her cheeks, and she dropped her head like a guilty child.
“Of course I care—that is, in a way,” she was somehow forced to admit before the bar of his silence. “Why shouldn’t I hate to lose the friend who used to carry my books to school, and fought the other boys for my sake, and has been a brother to me all these years? Of course I do. And when I am tired I cry for nothing—just nothing. I——”
It was certainly a brave attempt at eloquence, but perhaps it was not wonderfully convincing. At all events it did not keep Anthony from taking possession of one of her hands and interrupting her with a most irrelevant speech.
“Juliet, do you remember telling me that you should expect a man who loved you to carry your likeness always with him? And you asked me for hers—and I had to own I had left it behind. Yet I had one with me then—it is always with me—and that was why I forgot the other. Look.”
He drew out a little silver case, and Juliet, reluctantly releasing one eye from the shelter of the friendly sofa pillow, saw with a start her own face look smiling back at her. It was a little picture of her girlish self which she had given him long ago when he went away to college.