Geoffrey helped her. "What is it, Miss Vesta?" he asked, tenderly. "You are going to tell me something."
Miss Vesta looked around her timidly. "Sister Phoebe did not wish me to mention it," she said, in a low tone. "She thinks it—indelicate. But—you are so kind, Doctor Strong, and you are a physician. Poor little Vesta has had a disappointment, a cruel disappointment."
Geoffrey murmured something, he hardly knew what. The little lady hurried on. "It is not that I have any sympathy with—I never liked the object—not at all, I assure you, Doctor Strong. But her heart was fixed, and she had had every reason to suppose herself—it has been a terrible blow to her. Renunciation—in youth—is a hard thing, my dear young friend, a very hard thing."
She pressed his hand, and hurried away with her scissors, giving one backward look to make sure that the lamp showed no aspect that did not shine with the last touch of brilliancy.
Geoffrey Strong went down into the garden—he had not been there since the day of the sobbing—and paced about, never thinking of the pipe in his pocket. He found himself talking to the blue larkspur. "Beast!" was what he called this beautiful plant. "Dolt! ass! inhuman brute! If I had the kicking of you—" here he recovered his silence; found pebbles to kick, and pursued them savagely up one path and down another. A mental flash-light showed him the ruffian who had wounded this bright creature; had led her on to love him, and then—either betrayed his brutal nature so that hers rose up in revolt, or—just as likely—that kind of man would do anything—gone off and left her. His picture revealed a smart-looking person with black hair and a waxed moustache, and complexion of feminine red and white (Geoffrey called it beef and suet).
"The extraordinary thing is, what women see in such a fellow!" he told the syringa. The syringa drooped, and looked sympathetic. The hammock was hanging there still—poor little thing! Geoffrey did not mean the hammock. He stood looking at the place, and winced as the sobs struck his ear again; memory's ear this time, but that was hardly less keen. How terribly she grieved! she must have cared for him; bang! went the pebbles again.
There was a rustle behind the syringa-bush. Geoffrey looked up and saw
Vesta Blyth standing before him.
He could not run away. He must not look at her professionally. Despair imparted to his countenance a look of stony vacuity which sat oddly on it.
The girl looked at him, and it seemed as if the shadow of a smile looked out of her shadowy eyes. "I thought you might be here, Doctor Strong," she said, quietly. "I am coming in to tea to-night. I am entirely myself again, I assure you—and first I wished—I want to apologise to you for my absurd behaviour the other day."
"Please don't!" said Geoffrey.