Olive's cheque-book—for she had a bank account of her own—lay open on her davenport, and Allan's eye caught the counterfoil of one, dated that very day, and almost wet still, for £400.
'Four hundred pounds!' he gasped, and tried to tear open his necktie, while the room swam round him. 'Oh, God! can it be that she is playing fast and loose with me and that double-dyed villain?'
That she should have any intercourse, verbal or written, with such a wretch excited in Allan a gust of rage and bewilderment, disgust, horror, and intense perplexity.
Yet it might be all quite explainable—even the cheque.
She opened her eyes and closed them again, and pathetically he besought her to tell him what had happened, but could elicit no reply. Her slender throat seemed parched, as she failed to articulate.
'Oh, Olive,' said he, 'if I alarm you, forgive me. You know how I love you. Why torture me by this silence—tell me all—what has happened—who has been here?'
But he urged and pled in vain; her teeth were clenched.
'Is it some folly—some girlish imprudence? what is it? Dear love, only tell me?'
Still she was silent, and Allan's brows knit darkly and ominously, while, in the excited state of his nerves, he felt sharp twinges in the arm that had been fractured, and, when consciousness came partially back to Olive, she covered her face with her hands, and sobbed heavily and spasmodically.
What had happened? Why was she so suddenly cast down, hurled, as it were, from the joy, rapture, and repose of an hour ago, to the apparent agony and shame of the present?