'I would take the same train with you, Desmond,' said Vane, 'but that my things are not packed.'
'Do you leave us so soon?' asked Ida, who overheard him.
'I must,' said Vane, for whom there had been no letters that morning, much to his annoyance, as he wished to plead something like a genuine excuse to Clare for taking an abrupt departure. 'I mean to leave England—perhaps even Europe, if I can.'
'For where?' asked Ida, growing very pale.
'Well, I scarcely know,' replied Vane, with a laugh that certainly had no merriment in it.
'Do you really mean this?'
'Yes,' he replied, curtly.
She was silent, but looked at him pleadingly, and even upbraidingly across the table, while Jerry, becoming, as he thought, grim as Ajax, busied himself with a piece of partridge pie.
'No, no,' thought he; 'I shall not again begin that hazardous play with love, which some one truly calls "the deadly gambling of heart and thought and sense, which casts all stakes in faith upon the venture of another's life."'
He had hoped that by the mere force of his own passionate love for her some tenderness might be reawakened in her heart for him; and now—now, after all, she was actually fooling him—vulgarly fooling him!