As he sat gazing at the small blue flowers a soft mist crept into his eyes and rose and rose until it blotted out both flowers and cigar-case and blurred the light blazing overhead.
Then from the innermost receptacle of his pocket-book he took a piece of soft tissue paper and extracted from it, with much tenderness, the half of a three-penny piece, which, after putting tenderly to his lips, he laid alongside the blue “forget-me-nots.”
“It is just three years ago,” he murmured to himself, “since Jeannie gave me these when I first left for London to try my hand at medicine there. I remember the very words of the old song which she repeated as she gave me the half of the broken coin:
‘Now take this lucky thrupenny bit,
’Twill help you bear in mind,
A faithful, loving, trusting heart,
You left in tears behind.’
And although I have never seen my darling since, I have been true to her in word and thought and deed.
“Yes, indeed, I have,” he repeated almost fiercely, as though someone had challenged his statement; and then, as if a twinge of remorse tortured him, he cried out, “Oh, forgive me, pet, if I have ever wavered, even for a moment; you know I have never loved anyone but you.”
The heavy tears dropped from his eyes, and fell on the blue “forget-me-nots;” and then, as if ashamed to show his womanishness even to the walls opposite, he looked out into the night, through which the express now plunged on its furious way, rocking under its sixty-miles-an-hour gait.
Richard Dalrymple was what is termed a good, square man, and under the strongest conceivable temptation to prove himself a renegade he was doing his utmost, and not by any means with eye-service only, to prove himself true to his little Scottish sweetheart.
The cause—not of his apostasy, for he was still true in word and deed, and yes, in thought too, to his fiancée—but of his anxiety, was, all unknown to him, seated in the adjoining carriage with a smile of mingled triumph and apprehension lighting up her splendid dark eyes.
When Richard Dalrymple had regained his composure and had lit his cigar, the lady in the next compartment, detecting the odor, smiled again.