As the carriage whirled into the roadway, she turned her head to cast a straining gaze up the silent drive to the old house. Then the acacias shut it from her view.
CHAPTER XVI
DERELICT
In Harry Sevier's outer office his clerk glanced backward with a startled expression, his law-book dropping from his fingers. "That's queer," he muttered. "I never heard him laugh like that before. Doesn't sound like a joke, somehow."
He rose and tapped lightly on the inner door, which he had closed upon his employer a moment before. But there was no response and he went back to his seat—and the volume he was studying. "Wonder if it was that note I gave him," he speculated.
The tap had fallen on deaf ears. Harry was sitting in the other room, rigidly staring at the note in question. There was on him a feeling of actual physical sickness. He did not know that he had laughed. At last he rose, and crumpling the written sheet into a ball, laid it in the fire-place and struck a match. His fingers worked clumsily and he broke several short off before a flame showed and he stooped painfully and held the match to its edge. He remained in the crouching posture while the paper blazed merrily up. In the charring heat it crackled and opened, showing for a brief instant in the baleful, blackening, light two sentences it had contained: "Think as gently of me as you can. I can never marry you—never."
He stood up dazedly and groped his way to a chair. So this was the end! She, Echo, whom he had thought so true, she had been playing with him—and now the game was over. To her he had been only a puppet, a card in hand to be played off, discarded for the winning of the greater point. Poor, brainless, fool that he was! There was no longer a yesterday—no dear eyes holding his, no Eden wind blowing the rose-petals nor silver stars swinging the incense of the gods! He had been living in a fairy-tale, a castle in Spain, a fool's paradise, hugging a ridiculous dream, that had had no reality to her, had been but a chapter of coquetry, to which she now wrote finis! "Think gently!" This was the epitaph of her flirtation with Harry Sevier—flung away, raked under, thrust from sight, a thing for the scare-crow and the scavenger!
He got up and going slowly to the window, stood many minutes with his forehead against the pane.
What remained for him? To sweep out of his life the shards of that beautiful thing that lay destroyed forever? To saunter on, with hypocritical smirk and affected nonchalance, down the empty declivity of professional habit, to an undesirable goal? To what end? Of what value had been his striving? A year ago he might have won her—no one else had had more than a slight hold upon her then. It had been that long denial that he had set himself that had undone him! What profit to him that he had won the mastery over himself, had cut the tentacle coils that were enwinding him? Of what had been the use?