Friendship and Folly: A Novel

by Maria Louise Pool

But all the time, notwithstanding everything, there was with him the dull memory of her wantonly broken promise about her behavior to Meramble. He could remember too vividly her face as she had been talking with Meramble on the veranda of the old house at Matanzas.

When this remembrance was at its keenest, it was only by great self-restraint that Lawrence refrained from starting up and shouting out a curse for the woman who could do such a thing. But she loved him? The old, dreadful question; she loved him? Even now, in the midst of smiles and tears and kisses, she could make him believe her.

For the first three days Prudence was devotedly attentive; she scarcely left his side, and her devotion was plainly spontaneous.

A slight fever had set in, though the wounded throat was doing as well as such a hurt could do. Prudence began to grow listless in the very slightest degree.

Lawrence made her leave him and go down into the court, where a party were heard laughing and talking. After she had gone, with painful intentness he listened for her voice.

Ah! there it was. He raised himself on his elbow. Yes, honey sweet, gay, seductive, suggestive. He listened, his wounded throat throbbing as he did so. It was not that he desired to know what she said, it was only her tones that he must hear. And he groaned as he heard them.

He wished he might be able to understand her. He was not the first man who has wished to be able to understand a woman.

As Lawrence sank again on his couch, another day came back to his mind,—that day when he had been lying in his room at Savin Hill and had heard Prudence laugh outside.

Then he had been going to marry Carolyn Ffolliott. Then—he groaned again and moved uneasily.

It was terrible for a man like Lawrence to have one spot in his life which he dared not touch. He winced every time he came near that place in his mind. He wished that it might be covered up, encysted like some morbid growth in the body, and not remain so atrociously alive. As a man runs away from some place where he knows he will be hurt, so Lawrence's mind always ran away from the thought of Carolyn. Yet somehow, within the last few weeks, he could not help thinking of her.