"Sterne may get drunk for all I know," he said, uneasily. "You see, I have been out of England for a long time."
She closed her book with a sudden movement, and rose to her feet.
"No, you must not go yet," he said, in alarm. "We have not settled the matter which I wish particularly to have settled to-day."
"We have talked quite long enough for one afternoon," she answered, coolly.
"But, Madeline, have you no pity?" he said, pleadingly.
"It would be folly to rush into such a matter hastily," she answered, in the same tone.
"But—but, Madeline, answer me one question," he entreated. "Have you—have you seen this man Sterne since I came back?"
"You have no right to ask that question," she said, drawing herself up to her full height. "Nevertheless, I will answer it. I have not," and without another word she swept out of the room.
Her heart was in a tumult of conflicting emotions. She was less satisfied with Gervase than she had ever been before, and less satisfied with herself. And yet she saw no way out of the position in which she found herself. It was next to impossible, situated as she was, to upset what had been taken for granted so long, particularly as she had acquiesced from the first in the unspoken arrangement. She felt as if in coming to England she had been lured into a trap, and yet it was a trap she had been eager to fall into. She had hoped when she saw Gervase, that all her old reverence and admiration and hero worship would flame into life again, instead of which his coming had been as cold water on the faggots. Whether he had lost some of the qualities she had so much admired or whether all the change was in herself, she did not know, but the glamour had all passed away, and her eyes ached with looking at the common-place.
She wondered if it were always so; if maturity always destroyed the illusions of youth, if the poetry of eighteen became feeble prose at twenty-one.