Otto met his anger-troubled gaze, unflinching.
“You are a first-rate shot,” continued Gerard, with bitter meaning. “Oh, a first-rate shot! Ursula was right. But I, too, can shoot straight.”
Then he broke off short, and struck his forehead, bewildered among the madness of his own conceptions.
“Leave me to myself,” he gasped. “Only leave me. Go back to Helena—or Ursula—which is it? Tell Ursula also. Be sure and tell Ursula everything about me. Go and be happy, you and your charming—”
“Not a word more,” interrupted Otto, forewarned by the other’s tone. “I am very sorry, Gerard, and willing to make every allowance. But I will not hear a word against my future wife.”
Gerard rushed away.
“Why not, after all?” he asked himself. Brothers had met before in honorable combat alone beneath the moonlight shadows of Rhenish castle walls. He laughed aloud, and when the coachman’s dog ran out, barking, to greet him, he kicked the brute away.
Ursula could not but notice Otto’s silence—nay, more, his depression—as they drove back again to the Parsonage. She explained it by the Baroness’s reception of the engagement. For not even the most laborious amiability could make the two women misunderstand each other.
“Otto, I hope,” stammered the girl, with sudden heart-sinking, as they paused under the little veranda, “oh, I hope you will never repent.”
He hesitated, and, with human inconsistency, she resented the momentary delay in his denial.