“Why did you fail to keep the tryst, girl? It is long since the midnight bell tolled, and I grew weary of waiting.”
Berry gave such a convulsive start backward that the blossoming shrubs behind her were shaken, and dropped a shower of sweet flower petals to the ground.
“I—I—oh, I was so wretched thinking of my dear mother dead and my lost home, and the sorrows of my life, that I forgot everything else,” faltered the poor girl, with a dazed air. “What was it, please, you wanted of me?”
Charley Bonair was not going to leave just now, oh, no! He would stay and see what lark the girl was up to, anyway. Perhaps time had changed her, and she was not the good little angel of the past! Somehow he felt himself grow jealous at the thought, even while the quick thought came she might now be more to him.
Why did he feel all at once that he hated little Berry? Was it that she had destroyed his faith?
I deemed her the one thing undefiled
By the air we breathe, in a world of sin;
The truest, the tenderest, purest child,
A man ever trusted in.
What was this reproach for a tryst she had failed to keep? He would listen, he would learn her sin.