He had seen Connie off to Church. Con never missed. Ellice had not gone. Ellice was perhaps a little less constant than Con. He wondered where the girl was now, and, thinking of her, the frown on his face was smoothed away.
Always there was wonder, a sense of unreality in his mind; a feeling that somehow, in some way, he was wrong. He must be wrong. Strangely enough, these last few days he had thought more constantly of Ellice than of Joan. He had pictured her again and again to himself—a little, white-clad, barefooted figure standing against the dusky background of the hallway, framed by the open door. He remembered the colour in her cheeks, and her brave championship of the other woman; but he remembered most of all the look in her eyes when she had said to him, “Please, please don’t!”
“I shall never kiss her again,” he said, and said it to himself, and knew as he said it that he was denying himself the thing for which now he longed.
He had kissed Joan’s cold cheek, he had kissed her hand, but her lips had not been for him. He had wondered once if they ever would be, and he had cared a great deal; now he ceased to wonder.
“I shall never kiss Gipsy again,” he thought, and, turning, saw her.
“So you—you didn’t go to Church, Gipsy?”
“I thought you had gone to Starden.”
They stood and looked at one another.
“No. I don’t think I shall go to Starden to-day.”
“But they expect you.”