“Mrs. Churchley told me. She has gone abroad for a year.”
“And she didn’t tell you what I said to her?”
Godfrey showed an impatience. “Why should I take this trouble if she had?”
“You might have taken it to make me suffer,” said Adela. “That appears to be what you want to do.”
“No, I leave that to you—it’s the good turn you’ve done me!” cried the young man with hot tears in his eyes.
She stared, aghast with the perception that there was some dreadful thing she didn’t know; but he walked on, dropping the question angrily and turning his back to her as if he couldn’t trust himself. She read his disgust in his averted, face, in the way he squared his shoulders and smote the ground with his stick, and she hurried after him and presently overtook him. She kept by him for a moment in silence; then she broke out: “What do you mean? What in the world have I done to you?”
“She would have helped me. She was all ready to help me,” Godfrey portentously said.
“Helped you in what?” She wondered what he meant; if he had made debts that he was afraid to confess to his father and—of all horrible things—had been looking to Mrs. Churchley to pay. She turned red with the mere apprehension of this and, on the heels of her guess, exulted again at having perhaps averted such a shame.
“Can’t you just see I’m in trouble? Where are your eyes, your senses, your sympathy, that you talk so much about? Haven’t you seen these six months that I’ve a curst worry in my life?”
She seized his arm, made him stop, stood looking up at him like a frightened little girl. “What’s the matter, Godfrey?—what is the matter?”