“Take it,” she said, holding out the ring to him. “It is yours, not mine.”
“No, no,” he said, putting back her extended hand softly, “not that. If we part, don’t let it be in anger, Effie. Keep that at least, for a recollection—for a token——”
She scarcely heard what words he used. It was he who had the better of it, she felt. She was angry, disappointed, rejected. Was not that what everybody would think? She held the ring in her hand for a moment, then let it drop from her fingers. It fell with a dull sound on the carpet at his feet. Then she turned round, somehow controlling her impulse to cry out, to rush away, and walked to the door.
“I never expected she would have shown that sense and judgment,” said Mrs. Ogilvie, after she had shown the visitor, whose exit was even more hasty than his arrival, and his feelings far from comfortable, to the door. She sat down at her writing table at once with that practical sense and readiness which never forsook her.
“Now I will just write and ask Ronald to his dinner,” she said.
CHAPTER XXV.
But things did not go so easily as Mrs. Ogilvie supposed.
Effie had received a blow which was not easily forgotten. The previous mistakes of her young career might have been forgotten, and it is possible that she might have come to be tolerably happy in the settling down and evaporation of all young thoughts and dreams, had she in the fervour of her first impulse become Fred Dirom’s wife. It would not have been the happiness of her ideal, but it often happens that an evanescent splendour like that which illumines the early world dies away with comparative harmlessness, and leaves a very good substitute of solid satisfaction on a secondary level, with which all but the visionary learn to be content.
But the sharp and keen awakening with which she opened her eyes on a disenchanted world, when she found her attempted sacrifice so misunderstood, and felt herself put back into the common-place position of a girl disappointed, she who had risen to the point of heroism, and made up her mind to give up her very life, cannot be described. Effie did not turn in the rebound to another love, as her stepmother fully calculated. Though that other love was the first, the most true, the only faithful, though she was herself vaguely aware that in him she would find the comprehension for which she longed, as well as the love—though her heart, in spite of herself, turned to this old playmate and companion with an aching desire to tell him everything, to get the support of his sympathy, yet, at the same time, Effie shrank from Ronald as she shrank from every one.
The delicate fibres of her being had been torn and severed; they would not heal or knit together again. It might be that her heart was permanently injured and never would recover its tone, it might be that the recoil from life and heart-sickness might be only temporary. No one could tell. Mrs. Ogilvie, who would not believe at first that the appearance of Ronald would be ineffectual, or that the malady was more than superficial, grew impatient afterwards.