“I shall be here, however,” Robin had put in softly, “if I can be of the least use.”
“It is far more than I deserve. They are good, truly good women,” said Rex, in reply to Florence’s remark. And this, in her heart, his cousin endorsed. “Rex has been foolish—very foolish,” she said to herself. “But he has done his best to put things straight. After all, poor child, she will outlive it. It seems to have left a mark on him, however. He looks ten years older than when he went away.”
Some one else was remarking this with satisfaction.
“It has hit him in a tender point, I delighted to see,” Miss Forsyth was saying to herself. “Major Reginald Winchester, the mirror of chivalry and honour, to have flirted so egregiously with an inexperienced little fool, as to have brought her to the brink of a brain fever and goodness knows what not: it would be a nice story to tell, if I could tell it, which, alas! I fear I can’t. But, after all, it is not the publishing it I care about; it is the delight of knowing I have scored one against him.”
He caught her eye fixed upon him with something almost diabolical in its malice, and his strange suspicions redoubled. Then came his talk with Robin.
“Why did Eva not write to me direct—telegraph—anything?” he said at first, with a touch of impatience, when he had heard what his brother had to tell.
“Telegraphing would have done no good. Then she wanted to save you annoyance, to spare your ever hearing of the—mistake—at all, if possible,” was the reasonable reply. “Don’t you see, if the Miss Wentworth whose note she received had been an elderly spinster, no harm would have been done; at least so Eva thought, though I am not sure that I agree with her,” with a touch of grim humour.
“I have told her about Imogen,” said Rex. “Not by her surname. Eva specially says she had never heard of a Miss Wentworth. That postscript was so extraordinarily unlucky too,” he added reflectively.
“Angey particularly wanted no one to know the exact date of the operation.”
“And the confusion between the names—Evangeline and Eveleen,” Robin went on.