“She loves him still!” he thought bitterly.
He turned, looking paler than ever.
“I must go on. I only stopped to thank you both for your sympathy. We”—he hesitated again—“we appreciate it.”
The colonel laid his hand on the younger man’s shoulder, and his eyes misted.
“I’ll walk to the street with you, Dan,” he said, swallowing a lump in his throat. “I reckon there isn’t much we can do—any of us—but to stand by you-all.”
Daniel looked back at Virginia, raising his hat again, and the two men walked away across the long lawn to the group of cedars that grew by the side gate.
Virginia, left alone, turned and entered the house. She was very pale now, and her lips trembled. She went into the drawing-room and stood looking at the little old picture of William as a boy. She had looked at it a thousand times before, and she remembered that once she had kissed it. They had always been fond of each other and then—or was it a dream?—he had asked her to marry him. They had planned their happiness gaily, with youthful laughter at sorrow and doubt. She had loved him, and he had married—this woman!
Virginia would have been less than human if she had not thrilled at the thought that he must regret it. She felt that he did. He had already almost said so. He had been caught; she knew it! What woman, placed as Virginia was, would not have felt that! In the rush of sympathy for him she blamed only Fanchon.
She remembered the night at the Sunday-school hall and Fanchon’s blanched face at the sight of Corwin. Corwin had made Virginia shudder; but such men as this had been Fanchon’s associates, such men as Corwin had been part of her life, and William Carter had unwittingly married her! In the storm of her resentment, Virginia felt only that William needed her sympathy, he even needed—it was on the tip of her tongue to say—her love!
Then the thing suddenly stood out before her; she saw it in all its horrible nakedness and cruelty. The poor little wayward dancer caught in the snare of her past—whatever that past might be—and in the midst of her fancied security assailed and ruined, snatched from her new happiness, talked about, shamed, and at last cast out!