So he was sorry to lose Jack. But Daintry was inconsolable. When she and Kate were alone together she made her moan, sitting in a great chair three sizes too big for her, with her legs sprawling before her, her hands on the chair-arms, and her eyes on the fire. “Oh, dear, what shall we do when he is gone, Kate?” she said disconsolately. “Won’t it be miserable?”
Kate, who was bending over her work, and had been unusually silent for some time, looked up with a start and a rush of color to her cheeks. “When who is gone—oh, you mean Jack!” she said rather incoherently.
“Of course I do,” Daintry answered crossly. “But you never did care for Jack.”
“You have no right to say that,” Kate answered quickly, letting her work drop for the moment. “I think Jack is one of the noblest, the most generous—yes,” she continued quickly, “the bravest man I have ever known, Daintry.”
Her voice trembled, and Daintry saw with surprise that her eyes were full of tears. “I never thought you felt like that about him,” the younger girl answered penitently.
“Perhaps I did not a little while back,” Kate answered gently, as she took up her work again. “I know him better now, that is all.”
It was quite true. She knew him better now. A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind. Love, which blinds our eyes to some things, opens them to others. Had Jack offered Kate “Their Wedding Journey” now she might still have asked him to change the book for another, but assuredly she would not have told him it sounded silly, nor hurt his feelings by so much as a look.
It was quite true that she thought him all she said, that her eyes grew moist for his sake. But his was the minute only; the hour was another’s. Daintry, proceeding to speculate gloomily on the dulness of Claversham without Jack, thought her sister was attending to her, whereas Kate’s thoughts were far away now, centred on a fair head and a bright boyish face, and a solitary room in which she pictured Reginald Lindo sitting alone and despondent, the short-lived brilliance of his Claversham career already extinguished. What were his thoughts, she wondered. Was he regretting—for the strongest have their hours of weakness—the step he had taken? Was he blaming her for the advice she had given? Was he giving a thought to her at all, or only planning the new life on which he must now enter—forming the new hopes which must henceforth cheer him on?
Kate let her work drop and looked dreamily before her. Assuredly the prospect was a dull and uninviting one. Before his coming there had always been the unknown something, which a girl’s future holds—a possibility of change, of living a happier, fuller life. But now she had nothing of this kind before her. He had come and robbed her even of this, and given her in return only regret and humiliation, and a few—a very few—hours of strange pleasure and sunshine and womanly pride in a woman’s influence nobly used. Yet would she have had it otherwise? No, not for all the unknown possibilities of change, not though Claversham life should stretch its dulness unbroken through a century.
She was sitting alone in the dining-room next morning, Mr. Bonamy being at the office, and Daintry out shopping, when the maid came in and announced that Mr. Lindo was at the door and wished to see her. “Are you sure that he did not ask for Mr. Bonamy?” Kate said, rising and laying down her work with outward composure and secret agitation.