No other manoeuvre could have been more shrewdly calculated to advance his cause; nothing makes so compelling an appeal to feminine sympathies as a rejected suitor taking his punishment like a man; the emotional affinity of pity has been established ever since the invention of love.
Sally sank down mechanically upon a little marble seat near the spot where they had stood talking and stared without conscious vision out over the silvered sea.
Her thoughts were vastly unconcerned with the mysterious behaviour of Mrs. Standish and her brother, the inexplicable insolence of Mercedes Pride, the shattered bubble of her affair with Donald Lyttleton, the kindness of Mrs. Gosnold, or the riddle of the vanished jewelry.
Now and again people passed her and gave her curious glances. She paid them no heed. The fact that they went in pairs, male and female after their kind, failed to re-excite envy in her bosom.
There is deep satisfaction to be distilled from consciousness of the love of even an unwelcome lover.
She thought no longer unkindly but rather pitifully of poor, tactless, rough-shod Mr. Trego.
When at length she stirred and rose it was with a regretful sigh that, matters being as they were with her, she was unable to reward his devotion with something warmer than friendship only.
Friendship, of course, she could no more deny the poor man. . . .
CHAPTER XV
FALSE WITNESS