Mrs. Mallowe waited through the evening, looking long and earnestly into the fire, and sometimes smiling to herself.
“Oh! oh! oh! The man's an idiot! A raving, positive idiot! I'm sorry I ever saw him!”
Mrs. Hauksbee burst into Mrs. Mallowe's house, at midnight, almost in tears.
“What in the world has happened?” said Mrs. Mallowe, but her eyes showed that she had guessed an answer.
“Happened! Everything has happened! He was there. I went to him and said, 'Now, what does this nonsense mean?' Don't laugh, dear, I can't bear it. But you know what I mean I said. Then it was a square, and I sat it out with him and wanted an explanation, and he said—Oh! I haven't patience with such idiots! You know what I said about going to Darjiling next year? It doesn't matter to me where I go. I'd have changed the Station and lost the rent to have saved this. He said, in so many words, that he wasn't going to try to work up any more, because—because he would be shifted into a province away from Darjiling, and his own District, where these creatures are, is within a day's journey”—
“Ah-hh!” said Mrs. Mallowe, in a tone of one who has successfully tracked an obscure word through a large dictionary.
“Did you ever hear of anything so mad—so absurd? And he had the ball at his feet. He had only to kick it! I would have made him anything! Anything in the wide world. He could have gone to the world's end. I would have helped him. I made him, didn't I, Polly? Didn't I create that man? Doesn't he owe everything to me? And to reward me, just when everything was nicely arranged, by this lunacy that spoiled everything!”
“Very few men understand your devotion thoroughly.”
“Oh, Polly, don't laugh at me! I give men up from this hour. I could have killed him then and there. What right had this man—this Thing I had picked out of his filthy paddy-fields—to make love to me?”