He stumbled up to his feet red as the glow of the fire which had scorched him, poor boy, as if his unrequited passion was not enough. ‘If I am dreaming!’ he said, in the sharp sting of his downfall, ‘it is you who have made me dream.’
‘I?’ said Cara, in her surprise (the grammar coming right as the crisis got over); ‘what have I done? I don’t understand at all. I am not unkind. If there was anything I could do to please you, I would do it.’
‘To please me, Cara?’ he cried, sinking again into submission. ‘To make me happy, that is what you can do, if you like. Don’t say no all at once; think of it at least; the hardest-hearted might do that.’
‘I am not hard-hearted,’ she said. ‘I begin to see what it is. We have both made a mistake, Roger. I never thought this was what you were thinking; and you have deceived yourself, supposing I knew. I am very, very sorry. I will do anything—else——’
‘I don’t want anything else,’ he said, sullenly. He turned his back upon her in the gloom and blackness of his disappointment. ‘What else is there between young people like us,’ he said, bitterly. ‘My mother always says so, and she ought to know. I have heard often enough of girls leading men on—enticing them to make fools of themselves—and I see it is true now. But I never thought it of you, Cara. Whatever others did, I thought you were one by yourself, and nobody like you. But I see now you are just like the rest. What good does it do you to make a fellow unhappy—to break his heart?’ Here poor Roger’s voice faltered, the true feeling in him struggling against the vulgar fibre which extremity revealed. ‘And all your smiling and looking sweet, was it all for nothing?’ he said—‘all meaning nothing! You would have done just the same for anybody else! What good does it do you? for there’s nobody here to see how you have made a laughing-stock of me.’
‘Have I made a laughing-stock of you? I am more ready to cry than to laugh,’ said Cara, indignantly, yet with quivering lip.
‘I know what you will do,’ he said; ‘you will tell everybody—that is what you will do. Oh, it’s a devilish thing in girls! I suppose they never feel themselves, and it pleases their vanity to make fools of us. You will go and tell those fellows, those Merediths, what a laugh you have had out of poor Roger. Poor Roger! but you shan’t have your triumph, Miss Beresford,’ said the poor lad, snatching up his hat. ‘If you won’t look at me, there are others who will. I am not so ridiculous as to be beneath the notice of someone else.’
He made a rush to the door, and Cara sat leaning forward a little, looking after him,—her blue eyes wide open, a look of astonishment, mingled with grief, on her face. She felt wounded and startled, but surprised most of all. Roger!—was it Roger who spoke so? When he got to the door he turned round and looked back upon her, his lips quivering, his whole frame trembling. Cara could scarcely bear the pitiful, despairing look in the lad’s eyes.
‘Oh, Roger!’ she said; ‘don’t go away so. You can’t imagine I ever laughed at you, or made fun of you—I?—when you were always the kindest friend to me. Won’t you say “good-by” to me kindly? But never mind—I shall see you often before you go away.’
And then, while he still stood there irresolute, not knowing whether to dart away in the first wrathful impulse, or to come back and throw himself at her feet, all these possibilities were made an end of in a moment by Miss Cherry, who walked softly up the stairs and came in with her prayer-book still in her hand. Roger let go his hold of the door, which he had been grasping frantically, and smiled with a pale countenance as best he could to meet the new-comer, standing out into the room to let her pass, and doing all he could to look like any gentleman saying ‘good-by’ at the end of a morning call. Cara drew the shawl again upon her shoulders, and wrapped herself closer and closer in it, as if that was all she was thinking of. If they had not been so elaborate in their precautions they might have deceived Miss Cherry, whose mind was taken up with her own thoughts. But they played their parts so much too well that her curiosity was aroused at once.