“Wrong?” His voice was full of reproach. “Don’t you know that child is dead—little Marcus?”
The girl dropped into a chair and put her head on her hands against the piazza-railing. Her shoulders were shaking a little. That was too much for Fitzhugh in his overwrought condition. He put his hand tremblingly against the ribbons and lace on her shoulder and it slipped down, past the short sleeve, over the warm arm, to her fingers.
“Dear—don’t cry,” he said. “Are you crying for me?”
Swiftly her face lifted and a shock caught the boy as he saw the blue-green eyes full of the well-known laughter. His hand left hers with a start, and he drew himself up.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I made a great mistake. I thought you were gentle—” The rush of his feelings drowned the sentence that tried to be restrained. “I didn’t know before how cold-blooded a girl could be,” he cried roughly. “I thought you everything that was womanly. I gave you credit for being sorry for a chap in trouble. But I was wrong. You’re no friend to me; you’re amused because I’m wretched; you think it’s a joke that a poor little child has died from my fault; I don’t believe you have any heart.” The boy’s bitterly wounded feeling was in his shaking voice.
Then looking down at her, she lifted her face to his and he saw an astonishing sight. The bright eyes, their mischievous dancing all quiet, were filling slowly with tears.
“I’m sorry you think so badly of me,” she said, and her voice broke in the words. Then: “I’m going to tell you—Jack may kill me, but it has gone on long enough. I won’t have you tortured for Jack or anybody. It’s all—one—big—lie!”
Fitzhugh gasped, shivered with hope. “Lie! Little Marcus isn’t dead?”
Then the laughter broke through the tears softly for a moment, and her voice was sweet as a child’s as it trembled between the two. “Dead, no! Nor alive either! He’s just as dead as he is alive. There isn’t any little Marcus—there never was. It’s all a joke of those wretched boys in the infirmary. They cooked it up among them there, and Mr. Carruthers did the letter. Jack wrote me, and I coached Wipes, and kept them posted every day. I thought it was so good for Jack to be amused. But I didn’t know it would make you really unhappy. They were going further, they were going to have a mock funeral and make you come, but I told them I wouldn’t help in that. And Jack said then I must keep still and not tell you. It was to be to-morrow. Will you forgive me? Will you take back those bad names?”
I think Fitzhugh, the cadet, must have interrupted Miss Duncan rudely then, for Captain Fitzhugh, the officer, stopped and laughed and would not tell me what happened next.