"Dear Henry,—I am so sorry to tell you that I cannot continue our engagement. My affections have undergone a change, and I think it best for both of us that we should not carry out the engagement. I have promised to marry Mr. Trentham, who really thought we were never engaged. I haven't worn the ring much, as I didn't care greatly for the style of it, and now return it. I feel it is best for both of us to cease our correspondence. I shall always wish you well.— Sincerely yours,
"Flo Winton."
"An ass," undoubtedly. The thing that he had often wished had happened, yet he felt chagrined, and the sense of having been wronged leaped up at him.
"She has made a fool of me," thought Henry, after reading the brief note, "and yet I'm glad." But he was nothing of the kind. He knew that he ought to be glad; he had hoped for this for nearly a year in the odd moments when he saw things clearly, and realised that Flo was receding from the place she had once held in his esteem. His visits to Laysford had not improved matters. He was vexed, irritated, disappointed—anything but glad. His self-esteem was wounded, and to have avoided an injury there he would have faced even the obligation he had entered into before coming to London.
"She has taken up Trentham because the creature has a bit of money," he muttered savagely, crumpling up the offending note, and then opening it out to read the fateful words again. "So much for women!" And he swept the sex aside for the perfidy of this one, though the woman's very selfishness was the saving of him.
"Delighted!" he wrote in bold letters on a postcard, and put her name and address on it. Then he tore it up, and feared he was a cad to the bargain.
Delighted! He was miserable for three days, until he could sit down and pen a sensible letter, in which he expressed the opinion that Flo had a better knowledge of her affections than he had, and that while he would never have given her the pain of breaking their engagement, he accepted the situation with some philosophy, since it did not altogether run against his own inclination.
A silly affair enough, as he came to understand once the final letter had been posted, and even so he had a delusion that at some time he had been actually in love with Flo. One cannot tell whether she had any delusions on the same object. She was not of the kind who dream dreams.
"I'm terribly sorry, old man, that Flo has cut up this way," wrote Edgar. "I always fancied you and she were engaged, but evidently not. Trentham is a very decent sort. They're to be married soon now that the mater is all right again. Flo is nuts on 'style,' you know, and you are not—unless it's literary style. After all, perhaps it's for the best. I think everything is for the best except what happens at the Leader office. Steel still keeps the uneven tenor of his way. I make wonderful progress. Don't gasp when I tell you that, quite unsolicited, I got a rise of half-a-crown last week. I think I shall buy a motor-car with it. Fancy, Jones has gone in for electric light. You wouldn't know the place now—the light shows up the dirt so strongly."
But Laysford had entirely lost interest for Henry now. To fancy one has been in love is almost as serious a condition as to be in love.