The older man looked at him with almost contemptuous incredulity. "My dear fellow, what is the use of denying facts? You can't make black white, can you? Day before yesterday you loved this—this," he seemed to search for some epithet; glanced at David, and said, almost meekly: "girl. Day before yesterday she expected to marry you. To-day she is the wife of another man. Have you committed any crime in the last three days which justifies that?"
"Yes," David said, in a smothered voice, "I have." Then he handed back to the shamed and angry man the poor, pitiful little letter. "Don't you see? She says, 'David didn't want'"—he broke off, unable to speak. A moment later he added, "'E. F.' She isn't used to the—the other, yet," he said, again with that bewildered look.
But Elizabeth's uncle was too absorbed in his own humiliation to see confession in that tragic initial. "What is that nonsense about your not wanting her?"
"She thought so. She had reason to think so."
"You had better explain yourself, David."
"She wrote to me," David said, after a pause; "she told me she would have that money of hers on her birthday. She said we could be married then." He reddened to his temples. "She asked me to marry her that day; asked me, you understand." He turned on his heel and went over to the window; he stood there for some minutes with his back to Robert Ferguson. The green door in the wall between the two gardens was swinging back and forth on sagging hinges; David watched it with unseeing eyes; suddenly a sooty pigeon came circling down and lit just inside the old arbor, which was choked with snow shovelled from the flagstones of the path. Who can say why, watching the pigeon's teetering walk on the soot-specked snow, David should smell the fragrance of heliotrope hot in the sunshine, and see Elizabeth drawing Blair's ring from her soft young bosom? He turned back to her uncle, with a rigid face: "Well, I—I said—'no' to her letter. Do you understand? I told her 'no.' 'No,' to a girl like Elizabeth! Because, in my—my filthy pride—" he paused, picked up a book, turned it over and over, and then put it straight edge to edge with the table. His hand was trembling violently. When he could speak again it was in a whisper. "My cursed pride. I didn't want to marry until I could do everything. I wasn't willing to be under obligations; I told her so. I said—'no.' It made her angry. It would make any girl angry,—but Elizabeth! Why, she used to bite herself when she was angry. When she is angry, she will do—anything. She has done it. My God!"
Robert Ferguson could not look at him. He made a pretense of taking up some papers from his desk, and somehow or other got himself out of the room. He found Miss White in the hall, clasping and unclasping her little thin old hands.
"How did he—?" she tried to say, but her poor nibbling lip could not finish the question.
"How does a man usually take a stab in the back?" he flung at her. "Don't be a—" He stopped short. "I beg your pardon, Miss White." But she was too heartbroken to resent the rudeness of his suffering.
After that they stood there waiting, without speaking to each other. Once Mr. Ferguson made as if he would go back to the library, but stopped with his hand on the door-knob; once Miss White said brokenly, "The boy must have some breakfast"; but still they left him to himself.