"Give me hope. I cannot leave you without hope."
"I can say nothing more than I have said. My heart is sore for Allan. Allan is first in my thoughts, and must be for a long time. I hate myself for having behaved so badly to him."
"And what of your behaviour to me? How cold! how cruel!"
"Oh, thank Heaven, here come Mrs. Tolmash and her daughter. Now you must go."
Geoffrey looked round and saw a middle-aged lady in a chair being wheeled across the lawn, a girl in a pink frock pushing the chair.
He gave Suzette a despairing look, picked up his hat from the grass, and walked quickly away. He was in no mood to make the acquaintance of the pink frock or the lady in the chair, though that plump, benevolent person, with neat little grey curls clustering round a fair forehead, looked quite capable of asking him to luncheon.
He walked back to the nearest station, angry beyond measure, and paced the platform for an hour, waiting for the train for Eastleigh, and with half a mind to throw himself under the first express that came shrieking by. Yet that were basest surrender.
"She is possessed by a devil of obstinacy," he told himself. "But the stronger devil within me shall master her."
While the more fiery and arrogant of Suzette's lovers was raging against her coldness, resolved to bear down all opposing forces, to ride roughshod over every obstacle, her gentler and more conscientious lover was hiding his grief in the quiet of that level and unromantic land on which his eyes had first opened. No tempest had raged when Allan was born. He had entered life amidst no grandeurs of mountain and glacier, arrested avalanche and roaring torrent. An English home—English to intensity—had been his cradle; a mild, even-tempered mother, a father in whom a gentle melancholy was the prevailing characteristic. Growing up under such home-influences, Allan Carew had something of womanly gentleness interwoven with the strong fibre of a fine manly nature. He had the womanly capacity to suffer in silence, to submit to Fate, and to take a very humble place at the banquet of life.