“Of course, everybody set themselves against us, Pansy’s relations as well as mine.”
Pansy trembled, for the deep, sweet, thrilling voice went to her heart, which began to beat heavily and painfully. How her thoughts went back to the past, when he had been her worshiped lover, and she had thought him true!
“We met in secret, my sweet little love and I,” continued Norman, “but we could not see each other very often, because she had to work in the factory all the week. But on Sundays I saw her at church, and in the afternoons she would come here, or to Libby Hill Park, always to a different place, that no one might suspect us. I would have married her at once, but we should have had nothing to live on, as I had no clients yet, and my father had threatened to disinherit me if I did not give her up. But I vowed in secret that I would not do that, and, at last, fate—as I thought—opened out a way for us to be happy. I found a client who wished me to go to Europe and manage an important case.”
“And you went?” she asked, for he paused so long that she feared his confidences were at an end.
“Yes, I went,” he answered slowly; then he looked at her gravely, and said: “You are a stranger, Mrs. Falconer, and there is something connected with my trip to London that I should not betray, perhaps, for the sake of my family.”
“Whatever you tell me will be held sacred,” she said, almost inaudibly, and the dark eyes looked at her in a sort of wonder.
“I ought not to betray this to any one but a dear friend,” he said hesitatingly. “Mrs. Falconer, I wonder if you could like me well enough to be my friend? It would be very pleasant to me. You look so much like her that I should find comfort in your friendship.”
Many and many a time Pansy Laurens had said to herself that Norman Wylde was the greatest enemy she had on earth. But now she held out her hand to him, in its soft silken glove, and he took it and pressed it eagerly.
“I will be your friend,” she said, wondering if he was going to confess to her now about the secret marriage that was no marriage, after all. She was so curious to hear how he would justify that that she did not hesitate to promise him her friendship.
But, to her wonder and indignation, he skipped quite over that important era in his love affair, and went on telling her about his trip to London: