At last she answered him.
“Nothing much,” she said. “Oh, nothing at all, really.” She gave a funny little cracked laugh. “Only—I’m not—engaged any longer.... I told you I was ‘fey’ last night.”
Almost before she had finished speaking, he felt her slight young body suddenly become a dead weight on his arm. She crumpled up against him, and sank into the blessed oblivion of unconsciousness.
The following morning two rather strained young faces confronted each other across the Cottage breakfast table. After Ann had recovered consciousness the previous evening, she had confided to Robin something of what had taken place during the interview between herself and Eliot. He had vainly tried to dissuade her, urging that she was too tired to talk and had much better go to bed and rest.
“I’d rather tell you now—to-night,” she had insisted. “Then we need never speak of it again. And there’s very little to tell. Eliot has broken off his engagement with me because he thinks I’ve deceived him.”
Robin’s anger had been deep but inarticulate. When he spoke again it was reassuringly, soothingly. All else he had kept back.
“You deceive him—or any one! If he thinks that, then he doesn’t know you at all, little sister. And what’s more, if he can think that of you, he isn’t good enough for you.”
“The trouble is”—with a pale little smile—“that he thinks I’m not—good enough—for him.”
She would give no reply to Robin’s impetuous demand for an explanation.