“Yes, that’s true; I don’t want, though, to make you so wretched. You shock me with your horrible talk. Adeline, look here, I don’t care; if you feel as bad as that I’ll marry you. Yes, I will, so help me God. You’re the only woman that ever loved me, besides my mother, and I’ve treated you like a brute. We men don’t always quite understand, but, Adeline, I can’t bear to see you wretched, and to know it’s all my fault. It is all my fault; I’ve behaved like a cad. Adeline, I mean it; I’m awfully sorry and ashamed of myself. I’ll tell my father exactly how matters stand, and I’ll make him let me marry you. You poor little innocent, to think that they’d make me!”
Adeline, for only answer, laid her head upon his shoulder, softly crying on.
“Don’t cry like that, dear,” he continued, in the same dreary tone. “It’ll all come right soon. I dare say we shall be fairly happy. We’ve made such a mess of our separate lives that the best thing we can do is to try and combine them.”
“Oh, Gerard,” sobbed the girl, “if I’d only known a day or two sooner. It’s too late now.”
“No, no,” he said, dully, stroking her hair. “I forgive you the trick you played me. I drove you to it, I suppose. Men are brutes.”
“Oh, Gerard,” murmured Adeline again, with closed eyes, “it’s not that. I’m engaged.”
“What?” he cried, edging back, so that her head almost slipped.
She started up then, quite briskly. “Well, and what was I to do?” she said, “with every week bringing me nearer. Other people answered my advertisement besides you, Gerard. And he’s a very nice young man, a lawyer’s clerk. I was out in the country with him all yesterday, and we settled it coming home.”
“Indeed,” said Gerard, scornfully. “And he—he—”
She blushed crimson.