“You would not think so, if you could see what a wreck he is—so wasted and worn that you would scarcely know him again.”
“You seem to have a great sympathy for him,” Lord Werter said, guessing perhaps at its source, from what Ray Dering had told him.
“Yes,” Annette answered, and her lips trembled with the sob that ached in her throat for the poor victim of her lover’s jealous wrath.
“Oh,” she thought distressfully, “he is to blame for the misery of all these lives. How will he ever atone to offended Heaven?”
Suddenly she realized that she had been monopolizing Lord Werter for more than an hour, and that people would be thinking she was a most outrageous flirt.
“I dare not detain you longer!” she exclaimed. “But how can I let you go without your promise of silence—for Daisie’s sake?”
“It almost seems to me that it would make her happier to know that I was true and loyal all the while,” he answered bravely.
“No, no; it could but torture her with a hopeless regret. It were wiser, better to keep her in the dark. ‘Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.’”
“You are a woman. You should know best,” said Lord Werter, with a mirthless smile of consent; and she exclaimed gladly:
“You consent—you promise?”