“Do women love men for what they bring?” she asked him. “Is that the lesson a mercenary’s life has taught you? Oh, Randal, you spoke of Chance and how it had directed all your life, and yet it seems you have not learnt to read its signs. A world lay between us in which we were lost to each other. Yet Chance brought us together again, and if the way of it was evil, yet it was the way of Chance. Again we strayed apart. You went from me driven by shame and wounded pride—yes, pride, Randal—intending the separation to be irrevocable. And again we have come together. Will you weary Chance by demanding that it perform this miracle for a third time?”
He looked at her steadily now, a man redeemed, driven back into the hard ways of honour by the scourge of all that had befallen him.
“If I have been Chance’s victim all my life, that is no reason why I should help you to be no better. For you there is the great world, there is your art, there is life and joy when this pestilence shall have spent itself. I have nothing to offer you in exchange for all that. Nothing, Nan. My whole estate is just these poor clothes I stand in. If it were otherwise.... Oh, but why waste words and torturing thought on what might be. We have to face what is. Good-bye!”
Abruptly he swung on his heel, and left her, so abruptly, indeed, that his departure took her by surprise, found her without a word in which to stay him. As in a dream she watched the tall, spare, soldierly figure swinging away through the trees towards the avenue. Then at last she half rose and a little fluttering cry escaped her.
“Randal! Randal!”
But already he was too far to hear her even if, had he heard, he would have heeded.
CHAPTER XXVIII JESTING FORTUNE
Jesting Fortune had not yet done with Colonel Holles.