“Then you care for some one else?” Jack was saying in a fierce undertone.
“Jack—don’t, please!” murmured she, tears welling into her eyes.
“But I must know,” he went on, hardly aware of his own insistence.
“Yes,” she said at last, never so faintly. “But he does not care for me.”
All of Jack’s manhood answered to this pitiful confession. He spoke to her gently, soothingly, laid her hand in his arm, and told her he would always watch over her like a brother. And Agnes, reassured, looked up in his face with loving gratitude.
At this point, Russell, on the return, again passed them. A single glance at the couple convinced him that Jack had won a prize dearer far than the one his friend had that day wrested from him.
“It was a miserable delusion of my vanity,” Russell said within himself, “that made me answer to the inspiration of her gaze. It is Jack, the fortunate, the pet of Destiny, who is to claim her. Here endeth the chapter of my folly.”
And with gloom in his heart he went back into his lonely room and life.