'I would rather have had this happen to any of us but Roy,' he said, walking up and down Mildred's room that night.
'Hush, Richard, she will hear us,' returned Mildred, anxiously; and then he came and rested his elbow on the sill beside her, and they talked in a low subdued key, looking over the shadowy fells and the broad level of moonlight that lay beneath them.
'You do not know Roy as well as I do. I believe he is physically as well as morally unfit to cope with a great sorrow; where other men fight, he succumbs too readily.'
'You have your trouble too, Cardie; he should remember that.'
'I have not lost hope, Aunt Milly,' he returned, gravely. 'I am happier than Rex—far happier; for it is no wrong for me to love Ethel. I have a right to love her, so long as no one else wins her. Roy will have it Polly has jilted him for Heriot.'
'Jilted him! that child!'
'Yes, he maintains that she loves him best, only that she is unconscious of her own feelings. He declares that to his belief she has never really given her heart to Heriot. I am afraid he is right in declaring the whole thing has been patched up too hastily. It has always seemed to me as though Polly were too young to know her own mind.'
'Some girls are married at eighteen.'
'Yes, but not Polly; look what a child she is, and how quiet a life she has led for the last three years; she has seen no one but ourselves, Marsden, and Heriot; do you know, gentle as he is, she seems half afraid of him.'
'That is only natural in her position.'