“You can choose another!”
“But she made me promise to wait her return!”
“I do not think that is at all necessary. Choose some other girl and let us have the agony over!” abstractedly.
“The agony! Sir?” and Cora Ellyson almost transfixed him with the indignant flash of her great, dark eyes.
He started, realizing he had made a blunder.
“Dear Cora, I beg your pardon, I did not mean to wound you. Do you not understand my impatient mood? That it is agony to me, this waiting to call you mine,” anxiously.
“Dear Frank, was that what you meant? I thought for a moment that—that—but, no, it would be impossible you should look on our marriage as a bore!”
“Impossible!” he echoed fervently, but in the bottom of his heart he was terribly distressed at his own indifference, he who had once loved Cora to madness.
He would not have had her find out the cruel truth for the world. He played his part as a true lover still with amiable deceit, thinking anxiously:
“This is but a caprice of illness. Love will come back.”