She was in floods of tears at his feet, her head drooping till her brow almost touched the ground. He left her kneeling there, and rushed away to the garden to hide his own tears—the tears of which his manhood was ashamed, the passionate sobs, the wild hysterical weeping of the sex that seldom weeps. He found a shelter and a hiding-place in an angle of the garden, where there was a side walk shut in by close-cropped cypress walls, and here Mrs. Wornock found him presently, sitting on a marble bench, with his elbows on his knees, his face hidden in his hands.
She seated herself at his side, and laid her hand gently on his.
"Allan, dear Allan, I am so sorry for you," she said softly.
"I am very sorry for myself. I don't seem to need anybody's pity. I think I can do all the grieving."
"Ah, that is the worst of it. Nobody's sympathy can help you."
"Not yours," he answered almost savagely; "for, at heart, you must be glad. My dismissal makes room for some one else—some one whose interests are dearer to you than mine could ever be."
"There is no one nearer or dearer to me than you, Allan—no one—not even my own son. You have been to me as a son—the son of the man I fondly loved, whose face I was to look upon only once—once after those long years in which we were parted. I have loved you as a part of my youth, the living memory of my lost love. Ah, my dear, I had to learn the lesson of self-surrender when I was younger than you. I loved him with all my heart and mind, and I gave him up."
"You did wrong to give him up. He himself said so. But there is no parallel between the two cases. This girl has let me believe in her. I have lived for a year in this sweet delusion—a bliss no more real than the happiness of a dream. She would have loved me; she would have married me; all would have been well for us but for your son. When he came, my chance was blighted. He has charms of mind and manner which I have not—like me, they say, but ten times handsomer. He can speak to her with a language that I have not. Oh, those singing notes on the violin; that long-drawn lingering sweep of the bow, like the cry of a spirit in paradise—an angelic voice telling of love ethereal—love released from clay; those tears which seemed to tremble on the strings; that loud, sudden sob of passionate pain, which came like a short, sharp amen to the prayer of love! I could understand that language better than he thought. He stole her love from me—set himself deliberately to rob me of my life's happiness."
"It is cruel to say that, Allan. He is incapable of treachery, of deliberate wrong-doing. He is a creature of impulse."
"Meaning a creature with whom self is the only god. And in one of his impulses he told Suzette of his love, even in plainer words than his Stradivarius could tell the story; and from that hour her heart was false to me. I saw the change in her when I came back—after my father's death."