'Then suppose that I ask you point-blank to throw her over?' suggests Margaret, looking full at him with her straightforward blue eyes.
'But you would not,' returns he hastily. 'You dear thing, it would not be the least like you; and it would only make her hate Prue for life. Ah, you do not know Betty!'
'And, meanwhile, where is her âme damnée, pray?' asks Margaret with a curling nose.
'"Where is John Talbot? Where is valiant John?"'
Freddy shrugs his shoulders.
'Valiant John is a little slack of late; he wants poking up a bit. But'—with a coaxing change of tone—'it will be just the same to Prue to go another day, will not it? and you will tell her, will not you? I—I really am in a great hurry this morning; and I—I—think I had rather you told her.'
'I will do nothing of the kind,' replies Peggy severely. 'You may do your own errands.'
Nor do any of his blandishments, any of his numerous assertions of the reverential attachment he has always felt for herself, any of his asseverations of the agonising grief it causes him to give the slightest pain to Prue, avail to make her budge one inch from her original resolution. She watches him as, with a somewhat hang-dog air, he walks across the grass-plot to meet her sister, who comes treading on air to meet him. And then Margaret looks away. She cannot bear to witness the extinction of that poor short radiance. She does not again meet young Ducane; nor does Prue reappear until luncheon-time, when she comes down from her bedroom with red eyes, but an air of determined cheerfulness.
'It would have been much too hot for riding to-day,' she says, fanning herself; 'unbearable, indeed! We are going a far longer ride in a day or two. He says he does not think that they will stay long. He was so bitterly disappointed. I do not think that I ever saw any one so disappointed—did you?' casting a wistful glance at her elder.
'He said he was,' replies Peggy sadly.