"Bessie!" he said again contemptuously; he loosed his grip of the dresser, and swung round, standing with his back to her, that she might not see his face. "You've crushed every hope I had; you've—broken me; and you talk to me of Bessie. What, in the name of heaven or hell, do you suppose I care for Bessie; or whether she knows or not?"
Deleah, keeping her place on the table, listened to the altered, choked voice of him with astonishment. Their unfailingly polite—too polite! and retiring boarder! Was it really he, standing with his back to her, speaking of Bessie—Bessie!—in such a tone!
"You see, I never knew! I never guessed," she excused herself helplessly.
"No. I don't suppose you gave me a thought. Morning, noon and night you were everything to me. There was nothing else. I have worked for you, lived for you—"
His back was towards her—the horrible thought that he was crying came to her; his voice was rough and broken.
"If I had only guessed—" she said in hideous distress and embarrassment. She had thought, as all girls do, of one day getting an offer of marriage; that it could ever be such a miserable experience as this she had not imagined. If it had only been a stranger, she thought foolishly; some one outside her life, of whom she had seen little! But Mr. Gibbon—their boarder! The sight of him in their home circle had become as familiar to her as might have been the sight of her brother: she could not reconcile herself to the thought that this man in the horribly unfamiliar guise was he. "If I had only guessed—!"
"And if you had?" he asked, but hopelessly, without turning round.
"I could have told you the sooner. There wouldn't have been such a—waste."
She slipped off the table, and stood beside it in a painful state of indecision. She longed to get away from the sight of him, to escape; but at the same time, being Deleah, she also longed to comfort.
"I shall not even tell mama," she promised. "We shall go on just as usual.
And soon—soon we shall forget it has happened."