He did not give up her hand, though; he stood and gazed at her with such pleasure in his eyes as could not be misconstrued. And then the most curious phenomenon came into being—a thing most wonderful, not to be explained. All the anger and the suspicion and the bitterness, suddenly, in a moment, fled out of Kate’s heart—they fled like evil spirits exorcised and put to flight by something better than they. Kate was too honest to conceal what was in her mind. She did not draw away her hand; she looked at him full with her candid eyes.
‘Mr. Bertie, I am very glad to have met you here. I can’t help remembering; and I should be glad—very glad to meet you anywhere; but——’
He dropped her hand; he put up both his own to his face, as if to cover its shame; and then, with a totally changed tone, and a voice from which all the gladness had gone, he said slowly:
‘I know; but I am not allowed to explain—I cannot explain. Oh! Kate, you know no harm of me, do you? You have never known or heard that I was without sense of honour? trust me, if you can! Nothing in it, not any one thing, is my fault.’
Kate started as if she had been struck, and everything that had wounded her came back in sevenfold strength. She could not keep even a tone of contempt out of her voice.
‘I have heard,’ she said, ‘that there was honour among thieves: do you throw the blame upon Ombra—all the blame? I suppose it is the way men do. Good-bye, Mr. Hardwick!’ And, before he could say a word, she was gone—flying past him, indignant, contemptuous, wounded to the core.
As she came back from the keeper’s cottage, when the afternoon was duller than ever, and the sky seemed to be dropping over the tree-tops, Kate thought she saw, in one of the roads which crossed the avenue, the flutter of a lady’s shawl. The girl was curious in her excitement, and she paused behind a tree to watch. After a short time the fluttering shawl drew nearer. It was Ombra, clinging close to Bertie Hardwick’s arm—turning to him a pale face full of care and anxiety. They were discussing their dark concerns—their secrets. Kate rushed home without once stopping or drawing breath.
CHAPTER LVI.
This incident passed as all incidents do, and the blank of common life returned. How short those moments of action are in existence, and how long are the dull intervals—those intervals which count for nothing, and yet are life itself! Bertie Hardwick went away only after sundry unsuccessful efforts on the part of his family to unite the party from the Hall with that at the Rectory. Mrs. Hardwick would willingly, very willingly, have asked them to dinner, even after the disappointment of discovering that they did not mean to ask Bertie. She was stopped, however, by a very commonplace hindrance—where was she to find gentlemen enough on short notice to balance all those three ladies? Mr. Hardwick, Bertie, and Edith’s betrothed made the tale correct to begin with—but three more gentlemen in a country parish on two days’ notice! It was impossible. All that Mrs. Hardwick could do was to ask, deprecatingly, that the ladies would come to a family dinner, ‘very quiet,’ she said; ‘you must not suppose I mean a party.’ Mrs. Anderson, with her best and most smiling looks, accepted readily. ‘But Ombra is not very well,’ she said; ‘I fear I must ask you to excuse her. And dear Kate has such a bad cold—she caught it walking across the park the other evening to old Stokes the keeper’s cottage.’