"No, no," gasped Dopsy, in a choked voice. "Please don't go away. I like you to be near me."
She put out her hand—a chilly, tremulous hand, with no passion in it save the passionate pain of despair, and touched his, timidly, entreatingly, as if she were calling upon him for pity and help. She was, indeed, in her inmost heart, asking him to rescue her from the great dismal swamp of poverty and disrepute: to take her to himself, and give her a place and status among well-bred people, and make her life worth living.
This was dreadful. Angus Hamleigh, in all the variety of his experience of womankind, had never before found himself face to face with this kind of difficulty. He had not been blind to Miss Vandeleur's strenuous endeavours to charm him. He had parried those light arrows lightly: but he was painfully embarrassed by this appeal to his compassion. It was a new thing for him to sit beside a weeping woman, whom he could neither love nor admire, but from whom he could not withhold his pity.
"I daresay her life is dismal enough," he thought, "with such a brother as Poker Vandeleur—and a father to match."
While he sat in silent embarrassment, and while Dopsy slowly dried her tears with a gaudy little coloured handkerchief, taken from a smart little breast-pocket in the tailor-gown, Mr. Tregonell sauntered across the room to the window where they sat—a Tudor window, with a deep embrasure.
"What are you two talking about in the dark?" he asked, as Dopsy confusedly shuffled the handkerchief back into the breast-pocket. "Something very sentimental, I should think, from the look of you. Poetry, I suppose."
Dopsy said not a word. She believed that Leonard meant well by her—that, if his influence could bring Mr. Hamleigh's nose to the grindstone, to the grindstone that nose would be brought. So she looked up at her brother's friend with a watery smile, and remained mute.
"We were talking about London and the theatres," answered Angus. "Not a very sentimental topic;" and then he got up and walked away with his teacup, to the table near which Christabel was sitting, in the flickering firelight, and seated himself by her side, and began to talk to her about a box of books that had arrived from London that day—books that were familiar to him and new to her. Leonard looked after him with a scowl, safe in the shadow; while Dopsy, feeling that she had made a fool of herself, lapsed again into tears.
"I am afraid he is behaving very badly to you," said Leonard.
"Oh, no, no. But he has such strange ways. He blows hot and cold."