“Yes,” said Dolff, “you are only a stranger, Miss Summerhayes. My mother, I think, took to you as if you had been her own, and everybody was at your feet, but you did not respond—that is to say, you were very kind, and the things you could not help but see, being in the house with us, though we never saw them who belonged to it, you told—as amusing incidents, I suppose, to——”
“What did I tell, Mr. Harwood?”
“Oh, I have not been taken into anyone’s confidence. You gave information—you heard him say it—which made a secret meeting necessary, and—all that followed. One might say,” said Dolff, with a cheerless laugh, “that everything had followed. I went mad, I suppose, for a little while; and you know as well as I do what I did. Oh, I am very well aware that you know. You saved me in your way after you had ruined me. Fellows say that women are like that—driving you mad first, and then—— But I never was one that talked about women—till I knew you.”
“I am very sorry,” said Janet, “to have given you a bad opinion of women; but I don’t know why Mr. Meredith——” Here her voice faltered a little in spite of herself.
“Ah!” cried Dolff, fiercely, “you have found out that fellow is not worth his salt, yet you could cry when you say his name.”
“It is nothing of the sort,” exclaimed Janet. “I cry—for any man in the world! You don’t know me, Mr. Harwood. Mr. Meredith, I remember, walked home a part of the road with me, as it was a dark night. There are some men who think that is a right thing when they meet a lady alone; and, though I am the governess, I am not very old. I think it very old-fashioned, and unnecessary, and I am not afraid to go anywhere alone.”
“You know very well if you had wished for an escort, Miss Summerhayes——”
“Yes, Mrs. Harwood would have liked her son to be at the command of the governess! Mr. Meredith walked home with me out of a civility which is old-fashioned, and he stood talking, which it seems is his way—with ladies. A man like that,” said Janet, almost fiercely, “will never learn that all girls are not alike, and that some detest these old-fashioned ways of being polite. But there was not in all that any reason for knocking the man down. I supposed when I saw it that you were, perhaps, working out some old quarrel.”
“You thought,” said Dolff, grinding his teeth, “that I had watched him, and flew at him, by premeditation, to take him at a disadvantage—not because I was driven mad to see him holding you by the hands.”
“How could I know one thing or another? There was no reason for anyone being mad about me: I can take care of myself without anyone interfering. But I did not want any scandal, I do not want to be mixed up in it; when a girl’s name is mentioned it is always she that gets the whole blame. You know what they say, ‘Oh, there was a woman at the bottom of it.’ Now, I had done nothing wrong, I was not at the bottom of it. Whatever you choose to say, it was no doing of mine.”