"There, sir, I love her almost as well as you do yourself," she had said. The words stuck for long days afterwards in the man's head. Until he heard it put thus bluntly, he had hardly known that the keen emotion which he experienced could be called by so divine a name as love.
It had, then, befallen him to love a second time, with a force which made his first love seem crude and weak—mere counterfeit.
His impressions of the few final seconds were blurred. The guard went along the train, closing doors. Gaunt was shut out, upon the platform. Anxious to show her gratitude, Virgie stood by the open window of her compartment, looking at him, trying to fix her mind upon him, but with a fancy filled with far other visions. The image of her little sister's face, the sound of her cries, was in her heart. She was picturing her own appeal to this new doctor, this deliverer who had been brought to her by no other hands than those of her husband. She looked down upon his hand, clenched upon the sill of the door.
"Put up the window when the train starts," he was saying. "I am defying the doctor in letting you go like this, upon my own responsibility. You must justify me by taking all the care of yourself that is possible. Remember, you have Grover to wait upon you, and you are to order anything and everything you want. There is no necessity for you to do anything but just sit with the child when she is well enough to wish it."
Her face lit up gloriously. She smiled softly, pityingly, at the man who could imagine a moment in which Pansy would not wish to have Virgie with her.
A whistle sounded. He started and winced. Then, gripping the door a moment, he leaned forward, his eyes burning in his head. "Remember," he blurted out, "you are on your honour—on your honour to come back to me. You have undertaken to return."
She stared at him in surprise as she stood a little back from the window. The train began to move. "Of course I am coming back," she said in astonishment. "You know I shall." For a moment she just smiled, but in bitterness. "I am released on parole," she said; "I quite understand."
For a few moments after the smoothly running express had slithered out of the station, off upon her way south, Virginia was held by the memory of the look upon Gaunt's face as she passed from his sight. It was puzzling. He behaved almost as if he meant to be kind; which was incredible. His face seemed to her to be altering, or to have altered, since she first saw it.
Anyhow, he had let her go. Her mad outburst had borne fruit—her revolt had been entirely successful. She was off, without him, going to London, going to Pansy. Her return to bondage lay in the future, dim and misty, not worth troubling about as yet. There were other far weightier matters to occupy her. Before they had traversed ten miles she had forgotten Gaunt, almost as though he did not exist.
He, poor wretch, having made his sacrifice, stood a moment with arms tightly folded, wishing he had not been so altruistic. His eyes followed the train till it disappeared, then he turned, and went haltingly out of the station, back to the empty motor. He muttered something to himself as he opened the door. "We shall see."