"Frank I wish you could get over it," said Bertie soothingly, from the depths of his armchair. "There is nothing now to be done. It is very sad that it should have happened so, but you must throw it off."
"Throw it off! Were you ever in love with a woman?"
"Certainly."
"Then you must know something of it.—But you could never love any one much; it is not in your nature. You love yourself too well."
"That may be; but at any rate I love you, and I cannot bear to see you thus, Frank. Get over it! They seem to have taken the whole business so ill that there is nothing more to be done. I wish you would only see that, and submit to the inevitable. Try to live for something else. Can there be no other woman in the world for you? Perhaps there is another. A man does not perish so for love. You are not a girl—girls do so."
He gazed at Frank with such a magnetic light in his eyes that Westhove fancied there was a great truth in his words; and Bertie's last reproof reminded him of his vacillation, his miserable weakness, which lay beneath his manly and powerful exterior like an insecure foundation. Still he clung to his passionate longings, his vehement craving for the happiness he had lost.
"You cannot possibly judge of the matter," he retorted impatiently, trying to escape from Van Maeren's eye. "You never did love a woman, though you may say so. Why should not everything come right again? What has happened after all? What have I done? I fell into a violent, vulgar rage. What then? Is that so unpardonable in the person you love?? But perhaps—I say, can I have addressed the letters wrongly?"
During a few seconds there was a weight of silence in the room, an atmosphere of lead. Then Van Maeren said—and his voice had a tender, coaxing tone:
"If you had written but once, I might think it possible; but three letters, to the same house—it is scarcely possible."
"I will go myself and call," said Westhove. "Yes, yes, I will go myself."