She looked up for a moment in her embarrassment of speech and met Frank’s face; it was gazing at her with an expression of pain and pity and patience which she did not understand and which increased her perplexity.
‘Yes, Margaret, you are right,’ he said: ‘I am better away from here for the present. My coming can do no good, and, as you have surmised, it gives me pain.’
At this the blood rushed to her cheeks, but he went on in the same quiet, resolute tone, as though he had made no reference to his love for her at all.
‘When one cannot say what one will, even when nature dictates it, it is clear that one is in a false position. I shall not come to Norfolk Street any more.’
‘But you are not going away—I mean from your home?’ exclaimed the girl, alarmed by an expression in his face which seemed to forebode some worse thing than his words implied.
‘No, Margaret; I shall be at home, where a word from you will find me at your service always—always.’
He spoke with such a tender stress upon the word that she felt a great remorse for what she had done to him, though indeed it had been no fault of hers. It is impossible, under the present conditions of society at least, that a young woman should make two young men happy at once; one of them must go to the wall. Perhaps if this one had put himself forward instead of the other matters might have been otherwise; the peach falls to the hand that is readiest. There are men that never win the woman they love till she becomes a widow; for my part, in the meantime—but I am writing of Frank Dennis. He was of a patient disposition, and had a very moderate opinion of himself. And yet his love for Margaret was great, and so genuine that he could have been content to see her happy with another man. Why he was not now content was because he did not think she would be happy; but he did not tell her so, for, though honesty might suggest his doing so, honour forbade him. There is an honour quite different from that of the fanfaronnading sort, one which has nothing to do with running a fellow-creature through for a hasty word, or with ruining some one else to pay our card debts—a delicate, scrupulous sense of what is becoming even in our relations with our enemies, a flower of a modest colour which grows in the shade. This was the sort of honour that Frank Dennis possessed, and which prompted him now to keep silence, when he might have said something which would have been much to his own advantage.
‘Good-bye, Margaret,’ was all he said, as he took her hand in his. He would, if he could, have even eliminated a certain tenderness from his tone, because he knew it gave her pain; but he could not so utterly conquer nature.
‘Good-bye, Frank,’ was all she said in reply, or dared to say.