Her eyes burned with a strange luminosity. Her utterance was eager.
"But you want somebody to belong to you now? Ain't that what's the matter with you now?"
He did not answer directly.
"I didn't think it was in you, Queenie, to follow me around and play the spy. I've liked you pretty well—but—I couldn't like this."
She stared at him helplessly, as an animal might have looked.
"I couldn't help it," she murmured, repressing some terrible emotion of despair. "I won't never trouble you no more."
She turned around and went away, walking uncertainly, as if from physical weakness and the blindness of pain.
Van felt himself inordinately wrung—felt it a cruelty not to run and overtake her—give her some measure of comfort. There was nothing he could do that would not be misunderstood. Moreover, he had no adequate idea of what was in her mind—or in her homeless heart. He had known her always as a butterfly; he could not take her tragically now.
"Poor girl," he said as he watched her vanishing from sight, "if only she had ever had a show!"
He looked back at Mrs. Dick's. Bostwick had ousted him after all, before he could extenuate his madness, before he could ascertain whether Beth were angry or not—before he could bid her good-by.