And shaking his curly head in despair, he once more plunged his red cheeks into his hands and fell abruptly silent.
Marcella coloured for sympathy. "I really wish you wouldn't talk in riddles," she said. "What is the matter with you?—of course you must tell me."
"Well, I know you won't mind!" cried the lad, emerging. "As if you could mind! But it sounds like my impudence to be talking to you about—about—You see," he blurted out, "she's going to Italy with the Raeburns. She's a connection of theirs, somehow, and Miss Raeburn's taken a fancy to her lately—and her mother's treated me like dirt ever since they asked her to go to Italy—and naturally a fellow sees what that means—and what her mother's after. I don't believe Betty would; he's too old for her, isn't he? Oh, my goodness!"—this time he smote his knee in real desperation—"now I have done it. I'm simply bursting always with the thing I'd rather cut my head off than say. Why they make 'em like me I don't know!"
"You mean," said Marcella, with impatience—"that her mother wants her to marry Mr. Raeburn?"
He looked round at his companion. She was lying back in a deep chair, her hands lightly clasped on her knee. Something in her attitude, in the pose of the tragic head, in the expression of the face stamped to-night with a fatigue which was also a dignity, struck a real compunction into his mood of vanity and excitement. He had simply not been able to resist the temptation to talk to her. She reminded him of the Raeburns, and the Raeburns were in his mind at the present moment by day and by night. He knew that he was probably doing an indelicate and indiscreet thing, but all the same his boyish egotism would not be restrained from the headlong pursuit of his own emotions. There was in him too such a burning curiosity as to how she would take it—what she would say.
Now however he felt a genuine shrinking. His look changed. Drawing his chair close up to her he began a series of penitent and self-contradictory excuses which Marcella soon broke in upon.
"I don't know why you talk like that," she said, looking at him steadily. "Do you suppose I can go on all my life without hearing Mr. Raeburn's name mentioned? And don't apologise so much! It really doesn't matter what I suppose—that you think—about my present state of mind. It is very simple. I ought never to have accepted Mr. Raeburn. I behaved badly. I know it—and everybody knows it. Still one has to go on living one's life somehow. The point is that I am rather the wrong person for you to come to just now, for if there is one thing I ardently wish about Mr. Raeburn, it is that he should get himself married."
Frank Leven looked at her in bewildered dismay.
"I never thought of that," he said.
"Well, you might, mightn't you?"