"It was Mr. Chester's own fault marrying the wrong woman," persisted Queenie, with a little heat.
Garth's loftiness and burst of eloquence did not move her in the least. His cool statement of facts was rank heresy in her eyes. What was it to her that hundreds of men had made matrimonial mistakes? In her woman's creed, that code of purity and innocence, it was a simple question of right and wrong. To love one woman and marry another, however expedient in a worldly point of view, was a sin for which there was no grace of forgiveness.
"Men make their own fate; it is for them to choose. No one need make mistakes with their eyes open," continued the girl, with a little impatience and scorn of this matter-of-fact philosophy. "If they make a poor thing of their own life it is not for them to complain."
"Ah, you are hard on us. You are only a girl; you do not know," returned the young man, looking down from the altitude of his superior wisdom into Queenie's wide-open indignant eyes with exasperating calmness. "Your life compared to ours is like a mill-stream beside a rushing river: one is all movement; the strong currents draw hither and thither."
"The mill-stream is often the deeper," was the petulant answer.
Garth laughed; he was not at all discomposed by Queenie's impatient argument. He would have enjoyed having it out with her if he had had time, but, as he told himself, he had more important business in hand.
"By-the-bye, you are making me waste my precious moments as usual," he observed, good-humoredly; "and I have never given you Langley's message. She and Cathy want you to come up to our place this evening; they think the cottage must be so dull now your guests have gone."
"How kind and thoughtful of Langley!" returned Queenie; and now the brown eyes had a happy sparkle in them. There was no place so dear to her as Church-Stile House. If Garth could only have known it!
"You will be doing them a kindness by cheering them up a little, as both Ted and I will be away. Have you heard," he continued, gravely, "that they are rather in trouble at Crossgill Vicarage. I had a letter this morning from Dora, I mean Miss Cunningham," went on Garth, coloring a little bashfully over his mistake.
"Are you going there? I hope there is not much the matter," asked Queenie, in a measured voice. There was no sparkle now in her eyes. The evening was to be spent without him; and then Miss Cunningham had written to him at the first hint of trouble. She had sought him, and not Langley.