“While you were supporting him?” There was a strange light in her eyes, and the blood had come back to her cheeks. “But where was Thomas—the man—then?”
“Oh, he had gone off, across the fields.”
“Before Arthur came up, do you mean?”
“To be sure, some time before. However——”
But, “No, Clement, I want to understand this,” she insisted, breaking in on him. Her voice betrayed her excitement, and to hold him to the point she laid her hands on his shoulders, standing before him and close to him. “Tell me again, and clearly. Do you mean that it was you who drove Thomas off? Before Arthur came up?”
He stared. “Well, of course it was,” he said. “Didn’t you know that? Didn’t Arthur tell you?”
She avoided the question, and instead, “Then it was your coat that was spoiled?” she said. “This coat?”
“Well, of course it was. You can see that.”
She looked at him, her cheeks flushed, her pride in him showing in her eyes. He had indeed justified her choice of him, her belief in him, her confidence in him. He had done this and had said nothing. The day was cold, and she was not warmly clad, but she felt no cold—now. It was raining, but she was no longer aware of it. There had sprung up in her heart, not only courage, but a faint, a very faint hope.
He had come to dash her down, to fill her cup of sorrow to the brim, to leave her lonely in the world and comfortless—for never, never could she love another! And instead he had given her hope—a hope forlorn and far off, gleaming faint as the small stars in distant Cassiopeia, and often doubt, like an evening mist, would veil it. But it sparkled, she saw it, she drew courage from it.