"It is not my style," she said simply, "but, after all, this is only real life."
He burst forth in a torrent of half reproachful regrets—he, Addiper, the chaste, the severe, the self-contained.
"And you the sweet, innocent girl who won the heart I no longer hoped to feel living, you would coldly abandon the love for whose existence you are responsible! You, who were to be so fresh and pure an influence on my work, are content to deprive literature of those masterpieces our union would have called into being! Oh, but you cannot unshackle yourself thus from my life—for good or evil your meeting with me determined my third manner. Hitherto I thought it was for good; now I fear it will be for evil."
"You seem to have forgotten all your manners," she said, annoyed. "And if our meeting was for evil, at least our parting shall be for good."
John Beveridge and Ellaline Rand spake no more, but walked home in silence through the country lanes on which the sunlight seemed to lie cold. The past was but a dream—not for these two the simple emotions which cross with joy or sorrow the web of common life. At the cottage near the top of the hill, where the sounds and scents of the sea were faintest, they parted. The idyl of Trepolpen was ended.
And John Beveridge went downhill.
CHAPTER VIII.
MORE ABOUT THE CHERUB.