'I promise you, Clare—dear Clare, you were ever my friend,' said he, in a broken voice, as he kissed her hand, and would have kissed her cheek, perhaps, but for the servants who stood by; and in half an hour afterwards the train was sweeping him onward to London.
'I had hoped, Ida, that Jerry Vane's visit would have had a different termination than this,' said Clare, the moment she got her sister alone. 'Why, you have actually quarrelled.'
'No, not quarrelled,' urged Ida.
'What then?'
'Parted coldly, certainly.'
'Why did you not keep your appointment with him?'
Again the expression that Vane had seen on her face—pain and embarrassment, sorrow and bewilderment, were all visible to Clare, who had to repeat the question three times; then Ida said:
'As he himself has told you, he accused me—me—of meeting another, and I was almost bluntly accused thus, Clare, when—when I was certainly beginning to feel that I might love him with the emotion that I deemed dead in my heart and impossible to resuscitate.'
'All this seems most inexplicable to me!' said Clare, with the smallest expression of irritation in her tone. 'Poor Jerry! he loves you very truly, Ida, and sorely indeed has that love been tested.'
'He loved me because he believed in me; that regard will cease when he ceases to believe, as he has done, through some insulting suspicion, the source or cause of which is utterly beyond my conception,' said Ida, wearily and sadly. Then she threw an arm round the waist of Clare, and lying on her sister's breast, said in a low voice, 'Another seems to hold me by bonds that will never be unloosed, Clare.'