Burnley laughed, then he chaffed, then he warned. Reminiscences of Rosser were flaunted, dabbed forth like blisters, their unpleasantness being excused by their curative intent; but to no avail. Then Harry, never tolerant of home tattle, suddenly lent himself as its mouthpiece. Carol was a flirt—nay, more; Rosser, her childhood's one chum, her girlhood's sweetheart, had been but two months absent, and she had picked up with, to her, the merest stranger, etc. etc. Harry further hinted at spiderly instincts, and hummed, "Will you walk into my parlour" somewhat portentously. The fact was that there was slight abrasion of his own heart's surface, but that he overlooked to view himself heroically, as most of us do, and believed his animus was purely in the interest of his friend. But the friend rejected salvation—flouted it—and in a few days the subject was emphatically—Yate could be repulsively emphatic when roused—closed between them.
On the tennis ground Carol and her new admirer made an almost daily group. They seldom played, but they wore flannels in compliment to the surroundings, and dallied with time in talking what one, at least, of them believed to be philosophy. But, as before said, Carol's moods were never stationary. She had a mischievous wit and an effervescent, infectious sprightliness about her—it was a constitutional characteristic rather than the immediate outcome of gaiety. This made acquaintances consider her one of the happiest girls in the world. But of late her friends were prone to notice a suspicious drowsy pinkness of the eyelids, a sad pucker of the lip corners which argued complexly with the gusts of exuberance that followed any fit of pre-occupation. And Yate, as he grew in knowledge of her, could have testified to other moods still—ugly ones—had he not been too neck-deep in emotion, too loyal, too profoundly worshipful of the secrets of Nature to notice anything but beauty in the characteristics of an ungarnished reality like hers. Besides this, though he was but a youth, he had cosmopolitan blood in his veins, and cosmopolitan dilution means poetry at a very early age—poetry which clothes womanhood with mystery, and makes her a ravishing mixture of puny weakness and irresistible strength. To him she was the handwriting on the wall of Belshazzar, a sign for wonderment and awe and dumb prostration, a problem too sublime for solution, though the key to many exalted enigmas lay, alas! merely with Rosser.
Of this Yate suspected a little—a very little. He never fully knew—nor indeed did she—how far the man was responsible for the development of the ineradicable events which crowded that autumn-tinted period. Once he spoke of him. It was when they had rambled from the tennis regions to where the edge of an adjacent common was banked with trees and dotted with seats arabesqued with initials by the playful penknives of holiday hordes. She had been capricious all day—moody, petulant—snappish, in vulgar phrase.
"Won't you tell me what bothers you?" he said, addressing the coil of her hair, for her face was bent to some hieroglyphics traced by her sunshade in the sandy ground.
"You!" she blurted.
"Shall I go?" he asked, meekly. "I've offered to do so often if it would make you happier."
"It wouldn't—nothing would make me happier."
"Why are you miserable?"
"I'm not," she muttered, and a heavy tear fell with a thud on the back of her glove.
He lifted the hand to his lips and kissed away the drop before it had time to sink in.