Down fell his card-castle! The havoc wrought on him by that one short talk must be borne in silence and lived down. It was Jack’s lady-love that he had coveted. To follow up the advantage he could not but feel that what he had gained with her would mean treachery to Jack. Rather than betray his friend he would so cancel his engagement to meet her at ten o’clock that she, considering him a boor, would not choose to hold speech with him again. He would simply fail to go to her hotel; and, cost him what it might, this course were better than undermining Jack.
III
As the hour of her appointment with Hubert Russell passed without sign or token from him, a blush of shame dyed the cheek of Agnes Benedict. She wondered at herself for making this engagement to meet Jack’s friend, and for feeling ashamed to speak of it to her family. But with a sort of desperate faith in him she waited in the little reception-room at the foot of the hotel stairs where she had promised to be found. When she could wait no longer she went into her room and burst into tears. Mortified by her want of self-control, she promised herself that Russell would yet explain satisfactorily the slight to her. At the station, where Jack finally appeared—arriving at a gallop in a cab just as the train was about to start—she experienced a new pang of disappointment. Not only was Hubert Russell nowhere to be seen, but he had sent no message. Agnes came to the swift, maidenly conclusion that it was because she had cheapened herself by making an appointment to see him alone after but a half-hour’s acquaintance. She would bear her punishment in silence, and tell nobody—Jack, least of all.
As the days wore on, Agnes felt that something had gone out of her life—something not quite warranted by the briefness of that interlude at the ball. Try as she might, she could not forget Russell and the emotion he had caused in and had seemed to feel for her. Jack’s letters home spoke of him as winning new honors in the college course. When June came the family went up again to Yale to hear the speaking for the “De Forest” medal, for which both Jack and Russell were to be competitors. It was known that popular opinion inclined to select Jack Benedict as the prize-winner, but that Russell was considered a close second. In their zeal for their own hero the Benedicts were beginning to look a little frigidly upon Jack’s opponent. And it is safe to say that all of them, save Agnes, hoped and prayed that Russell might not win.
Agnes, who would have given anything for an excuse to stay away, found none. The appointed day saw her one of an audience assembled within the walls of the old college chapel, whose prim Puritan interior made even this gala occasion seem a little less cheerful than a funeral elsewhere. She had been standing with her cousins in the corridor as the procession of senior classmen in caps and gowns filed by; and, to her utter discomfiture, a momentary halt in the line had brought her face to face with Hubert Russell. In an instant the blood rushed into her cheeks. Russell, looking her full in the face, saluted her with conventional reserve. In reality he felt more of inward excitement than did she. A moment more and they had parted, she to sit gathering her faculties together in one end of the pew to which the Benedicts had been assigned, and trying to believe that she had not cared a bit.
“Did you see that Mr. Russell?” whispered Louisa in her ear. “A stiff, cross-looking fellow, spite of Jack’s praises. Oh, Agnes, if he and not Jack should win the ‘De Forest’ I could never get over it—never. I almost hate him now, don’t you?”
“No-o,” whispered Agnes, blushing and hesitating.
“You are too angelic. And when any one can see Jack cares more for what you think than for all the rest of us put together! At any rate, you will own that Hubert Russell is very uncivil. He has never taken the least notice of Jack’s family, and considering all Jack has been to him! A man told me it is quite well known there’s a cloud over Russell’s family—something really dreadful, and that Jack has simply brought everybody to forget it and to treat Russell as if it had never been.”