Soon they reached the gardens.
“Now tell me about yourself, Ernest. What have you been doing all these long years, besides growing bigger and handsomer, and getting that hard look about the mouth?”
“A great many things, Doll. Shooting, fighting, playing the fool.”
“Pshaw! I know all that, or at least I can guess it. What have you been doing in your mind, you know?”
“Why, thinking of you, of course, Doll.”
“Ernest, if you talk to me like that, I will go away, and leave you to find your own way home. I know well of whom you have been thinking every day and every night. It was not of me. Now, confess it.”
“Don’t let’s talk of her, Doll. If you talk of the devil, you know, you sometimes raise him; not that he requires much raising in this instance,” he laughed bitterly.
“I was so sorry for you, Ernest dear, and I did my best; indeed I did. But I could do nothing with her. She must have been off her head, or that man” (Dorothy always spoke of Plowden as ‘that man’)” and Florence had some power over her; or perhaps she never really cared for you; there are some women, you know, who seem very sweet, but cannot truly care for anybody except themselves. At any rate, she married, and has a family of children, for I have seen their births in the paper. Oh, Ernest, when I think of all you must have suffered out there about that woman, I cease to be sorry for her, and begin to hate her. I am afraid you have been very unhappy, Ernest, all these years.”
“Ah, yes, I have been unhappy sometimes—sometimes I have consoled myself. There, what is the use of telling lies?—I have always been unhappy, and never so much so as when I have been in process of consolation. But you should not hate her, poor girl! Perhaps she has her bad times too; only, fortunately, you women cannot feel, at least not much—not like us, I mean.”
“I don’t know about that,” put in Dorothy.