Words cannot tell the agonies he suffered there. The tortures of the rack, where he would have been stretched limb from limb, until death relieved him, would not have been harder to endure.
He heard handsome, indolent Raymond Challoner pour into those pretty pink-tinted ears the story of his love, and he heard the lips of the girl who was more to him than life itself accept the young heir of the Challoner millions, in the sweetest of words.
“I have just one odd determination, call it a notion if you will,” he heard the young heir of Challoner say, “and that is, never to wed a girl to whom any other man has ever whispered words of love. No man has ever spoken of love to you, Queenie, or ever asked you to be his bride, has there?”
And the girl from whom he had parted on the white sands less than half an hour before steeped her red lips with the horrible falsehood of answering:
“No, Raymond, I have never given any one save yourself encouragement to speak to me of love, believe me.”
“I almost believed the bronzed and bearded, mysterious Mr. Dinsmore might take it into his head to try to win you,” he remarked, musingly.
Queenie Trevalyn laughed an amused laugh.
“What absurd nonsense,” she cried. “Why, he has never been anything more to me than a mere acquaintance,” and she polluted her lips with a second lie when she went on smoothly: “Papa paid him for the service he rendered me in that elevator affair, and that ended any obligation on my part. Furthermore, I must say that you do not compliment my taste very highly to imagine for an instant that I could possibly fall in love with such a dark-browed, plebeian-appearing man as Mr. John Dinsmore! The very thought that you could have imagined so mortifies me exceedingly.”
“There, there, Queenie, do not take it to heart so. Of course you couldn’t; only he followed you about so constantly that I own I was furiously jealous, and thought seriously of calling him out to mortal combat. Now that I do consider it soberly, I agree with you that he is hardly the type of man to inspire love in a young girl’s romantic heart, despite his bushy whiskers and melancholy air. But let us waste no more words upon him. We can spend the fleeting hours much more advantageously by talking of love and our future.”
They walked away laughing, arm in arm, leaving the man on the other side of the pillar sitting there like one carved in stone. The heart in his bosom had seemed to break with one awful throb, rendering him almost lifeless, and thus his friends found him when they came out to search for him an hour later.