“Oh, no; not a bit.” Darsie wrapped the wisp of gauze round her shoulders, and prepared to risk pneumonia with as little thought as ninety-nine girls out of a hundred would do in a similar case. The hour had come when she was to be told the nature of Ralph’s trouble; she would not dream of losing the opportunity for so slight a consideration as a chill!
Ralph seated himself by her side, rested an elbow on his knees, the thumb and first finger of the uplifted hand supporting his chin. His eyes searched Darsie’s face with anxious scrutiny.
“You didn’t hear anything about me before you left Newnham?”
“Hear what? No! What was there to hear?”
Ralph averted his eyes, and looked across the patch of garden. The moonlight shining on his face gave it an appearance of pallor and strain.
“Dan Vernon said nothing?”
“No!” Darsie recalled Dan’s keen glance of scrutiny, the silence which had greeted her own remarks, and realised the reason which lay behind. “Dan is not the sort to repeat disagreeable gossip.”
“It’s not gossip this time; worse luck, it’s solid, abominable fact. You’ll be disappointed, Darsie. I’m sorry! I have tried. Beastly bad luck being caught just at the end. I was sent down, Darsie! It was just at the end of the term, so they sent me down for the last week. A week is neither here nor there, but the parents took it hard. I’m afraid you, too—”
Yes! Darsie “took it hard.” One look at her face proved as much, and among many contending feelings, disappointment was predominant—bitter, intense, most humiliating disappointment.
“Oh, Ralph! What for? I hoped, I thought—you promised me to be careful!”