“I’ve no one but you,” she cried, “no one, no one!”
For several minutes they embraced each other in silence—the girl’s breast quivering with the after-sighs of her emotion and their tears mingling together and falling on Mr. Quincunx’s beard. Had Gladys Romer beheld them at that moment she would certainly have been strengthened in her healthy-minded mocking contempt for sentimental “slobbering.”
When they had resumed a more normal mood their conversation continued gently and quietly.
“Of course you are right,” said Mr. Quincunx. “I am not really happy at the office. Who could be happy in a place of that kind? But it is my life—and one has to do what one can with one’s life! I have to pretend to myself that they like me there, and that I am making myself useful—otherwise I simply could not go on. I have to pretend. That’s what it is! It is my pet illusion, my little fairy-story. It was that that made me get angry with you—that and the devil. One doesn’t like to have one’s fairy-stories broken into by the brutal truth.”
“Poor dear!” said Lacrima softly, stroking his hand with a gesture of maternal tenderness.
“If there was any hope of this wretched business coming to an end,” Maurice went on, “it would be different. Then I would curse all these people to hell and have done with it. But what can I do? I am already past middle age. I shouldn’t be able to get anything else if I gave it up. And I don’t want to leave Nevilton while you are here.”
The girl looked intently at him. Then she folded her hands on her lap and began gravely.
“I have something to tell you, Maurice dear. Something very important. What would you say if I told you that it was in my power to set you free from all this and make you happy and comfortable for the rest of your life?”
An invisible watcher from some more clairvoyant planet than ours would have been interested at that moment in reading the double weakness of two poor Pariah hearts. Lacrima, brought back from the half-insane attitudes of her heroic resolution by the intermission of natural human emotion, found herself on the brink of half-hoping that her friend would completely and indignantly refuse this shameful sacrifice.
“Surely,” her heart whispered, “some other path of escape must offer itself for them both. Perhaps, after all, Vennie Seldom might discover some way.”