“But what will your father say?” she asked, and Emma replied;
“I don’t know. I hope Glenthorpe will outweigh the Lyles. Robert will tell him to-night. There, he is coming, and I must go. Good-by, and come home as quick as you can. Tell Ettie, if you like.”
She kissed us both, as Godfrey had done, while Robert shook hands with Gertie, who said:
“I am so glad. I supposed all the while it was Julia, or I should not have thought it could make any difference. God bless you both.”
We did not expect Godfrey till after lunch, but he surprised us by coming in just as we were taking our seats at the dinner table. He was in town, he said, and thought it a waste of labor to go home and then back again, and so he came directly to our house, and helping himself to a chair, he drew up to the table beside Gertie, to whom he devoted himself with all the assiduity of an ardent and accepted lover. I think he looked upon himself in that light, and was not in the least prepared for the disappointment awaiting him.
At the foot of our garden, overlooking the river, is an old-fashioned summer-house, covered with a luxuriant grapevine, and Godfrey asked Gertie to go there with him as soon as dinner was over. His love was of the impetuous kind, which cannot wait to know the best or worst, and once alone with Gertie and free from observation, save as the bright-eyed robin, whose nest was among the vines, looked curiously down upon him, he burst out passionately and told her of the love which had been growing in his heart since the day he found her on the deck and stole the kiss from her lips.
“I have been so hungry for another,” he said, “and I had it, too, yesterday, when you lay by the water’s edge, and I feared you were dead. Forgive me, darling, if I took unfair advantage of your position. I could not help it, and had you died I would have claimed you as mine and told my love to all the world.”
“Oh, Godfrey, hush; you must not speak to me like this. Remember Alice,” Gertie said gaspingly, and Godfrey replied:
“I do remember her, and it is of her I must first tell you. When in my agony lest you were dead, I called you my darling and kissed your pallid lips, Alice stood beside me a witness to the love which never was hers. She was angry, as she naturally would be, and in her anger made me free from my engagement, and said she hated me and gave me back the ring of betrothal. After that she surely has no claim on me, and if she had I could not respect it now.”
Then very rapidly he went over with the entire story of his affaire du cœur with Alice from the time they both were children and the marriage was arranged by their parents.