In the few moments that Gay's fate trembled in the balance, she stole a glance at him, and saw his face pale, ravaged by the ordeal through which he had just passed, by this even fiercer one with scarce a breath between.
"You promised me, Gay," he said quietly, and she bowed her head, slipped to the door, and left him to the full bitterness of his triumph.
But when she had locked herself into her den, she glanced round the room as if the drama, lately enacted there, still palpitated, living in the air.... To a manly man there can be no hour more painful, than when his rights are invaded, and the impossibility demanded of him of a love where no love is; but it was of Lossie's passion and humiliation that Gay was thinking, of the uselessness of it, not Carlton's pain ... and then Chris's haggard, white, proud young face as it had looked just now, came—and stayed.
CHAPTER XXXII
DEAD SEA APPLES
It was late October, and Chris was riding harder than ever, and on the principle, as he told himself grimly, of "lucky in horses, unlucky in love," was having success after success, not only as a jockey, but a trainer, and bid fair to have a good stable of his own before long.
Gay had gone abroad with indecent suddenness immediately after her engagement, dragging the Professor with her, and forbidding Carlton to accompany them, because "she wanted a little time with Frank, since she was so soon to leave him." Yet, when at last she came back, after three months' absence, and then only because her brother insisted on it, Carlton was never able to get a moment alone with her, try as he might.
The devices she had used to stave off his proposal she used with fourfold skill to avoid being alone with him, she who had detested society, surrounded herself at all hours with it; even when she had to choose the decorations for the house he had taken in Norfolk Street, she took Effie Bulteel with her; the jewels he gave her, she never wore.
She treated her new tie as a purely nominal one, appeared careless and fancy-free; but she meant to go through with her bargain all the same, and a date in December had been actually fixed for the wedding, when the Professor with his usual inconvenience, fell ill.
Gay always declared that the trouble began with his discovery of a wonderful new microbe, that after due blazonment in the medical press, turned out to be something quite different to what it pretended to be, and, as she expressed it, sat up on its squirmy tail, making insulting faces at its non-discoverer. Frank took the matter so much to heart as to be at first hesitatingly ailing, then with considerably less hesitation, and as it entailed no effort, really ill for some time.