He paused, arrested by her pleading look.
“O, Mr. Meadowcroft, not me!” she cried vehemently. “It doesn’t matter in the least about me. It’s poor Rose. It’s——”
“Betty, sit back in your chair, or we’ll have to stop right here and postpone the rest of the discussion until to-morrow,” he bade her. She complied so meekly that he almost felt as if he sat behind the school-master’s desk.
“It is worst of all for Rose, of course,” she said mournfully. “But it was harder on Tommy than you might think. And—of course it’s different with you, Mr. Meadowcroft. I feel so mortified, so frightfully ashamed as well as sorry.”
“Nonsense, Betty. Don’t dwell on that longer. You have said you regretted your mistake and everything is all right between us. Honestly, so far as I am concerned, I don’t care that,” he assured her, and snapped his fingers.
She gazed at him sorrowfully.
“Didn’t it—didn’t it spoil all the pleasure you might have had in the school?” she asked, and a shadow clouded his brow.
“Well, Betty, I daresay it did—for the time,” he had to admit. “But I think it will work itself out so that later the memory won’t be unhappy. And now and for always I can truthfully say I don’t mind at all. I don’t care a copper. My sympathy remains with you.”
“But Rose?” she cried.
“To tell you the truth, Betty, I do not believe Rose requires much sympathy,” he said seriously. “I cannot think that she will take it greatly to heart. I have observed Rose very carefully—partly because of my desire to get some clew to the mystery—and I doubt extremely if she has really suffered at all. It is my belief that she didn’t go into the thing deeply in the beginning and that it won’t be painful for her to get out. Tell me truly: have you any evidence whatever of this being a great blow to Rose?”