“Oh, I’m sure you couldn’t be unkind to any one,” said the young man, sweetly. It struck him that his lunch-table looked very forlorn. “You couldn’t be, Miss Harriet.”
“Oh yes, I could,” replied Harriet, quickly. “I am always unkind, for instance, to people who call me Miss Harriet, and forget that my name is Miss Verveen.”
The doctor laughed rather awkwardly as she turned to go.
“You are quite right,” he answered; “quite right. Either Juffrouw Verveen or—not Juffrouw at all; I envy the privileged few.”
“So it’s ‘No’?” she said, with her hand on the door-knob.
“So it’s ‘No’?” he repeated, boldly, looking her straight in the face. But he read his answer there, and sobered suddenly, as the physician crushed down the lover in presence of the great tragedy so quietly enacting. “Yes, I’m afraid it must be ‘No,’” he said. “The sixteenth, you said? Tell your aunt I am awfully sorry, but as far as I am able to judge, she had better think ‘No.’”
Harriet hurried home through the autumn grayness of the sleepy little town. A peculiar smile hung fixed upon her forbidding features, a mixture of anxiety and content. She went straight up to her aunt’s bedroom.
“The answer is ‘No,’” she said.
Mevrouw Mopius made no reply. She lay back, with closed eyes and sunken jaws, almost as her niece had left her when sent forth upon this hideous errand. Harriet flung herself down on a chair, and resumed her novel. Presently she rose to slip away.
Mevrouw Mopius opened her eyes.