“He was faithful to the end of things,” the girl rejoined warmly. “He——”
“Nonsense. There’s no such thing to-day as faithfulness,” he declared bitterly.
Afterwards, as she lay in her bed at night—Alice remembered Enoch Arden and wondered if he had learned of his wife’s unfaith and that had made him so bitter. At this moment, however, the girl was too wrought up to think of aught but the matter under discussion.
“There is, too. There is—ever so much!” she cried hotly.
“Not at all. One faces this way—a tiny breath of wind, and round goes the weather-cock!”
“I should think—” the girl began indignantly. She didn’t pause because she didn’t exactly know what it was she should think but because he was looking at her with a strange, half-hurt, half-angry look in his eyes.
“Even you, Miss Lorraine,—pardon me, but aren’t you really an example? Wasn’t it only yesterday that you were saying that it wasn’t fair that this man who had loved music and planned higher things than his weakness could fulfill should be utterly forgotten because he ran amuck when his head was turned by grief? And to-day—apparently you can’t think badly enough of him!”
The girl’s heart throbbed wildly. A flaming colour came to her cheeks giving her real beauty.
“Well, you yourself!” she cried hotly. “You—you said nasty things yesterday about Dick Cartwright and now, to-day, one would think he was your best——”
Suddenly she stopped. She was aware of a disturbance from without. Someone was calling her name and banging on the door of the cottage. Now she realised that it had been going on some time and she had been vaguely aware of it. She sprang to her feet, her face horror-stricken. Her mother had come for her!