"Your master is out at present; but I will see Monsieur Karovsky myself."
Turning to Crofton as soon as the servant had left the room, she said: "You will excuse me for a few moments, will you not? Gerald will be back in a little while, and I do so wish you would stay and meet him. George"--offering him her hand with a sudden gracious impulse--"let this afternoon be blotted from the memory of both of us. You will never say such foolish things to me again, will you?"
He took her proffered hand sullenly enough. "I have said my say," he muttered with averted eyes; with that he dropped her fingers and turned away.
A pained expression flitted across her face as she looked at him. "You will wait here till I come back, will you not?" she said; and then, without waiting for an answer, she quitted the room.
With his hands behind his back and his eyes bent on the ground, George Crofton paced the room once or twice in silence. Then he said, speaking aloud, as he had a trick of doing when alone: "It is a lie to say she would never have learned to love me! She may try to deceive herself by saying so; but she cannot deceive me. Had not my smooth-tongued cousin come between us, she would have been mine. I had no rival but him. Not only has he robbed me of the woman I loved, but of this old house and all this fair domain, which would all have been my own, had he not come between my uncle and me, and made the old man's bitterness against me bitterer still.
"Oh," he exclaimed bitterly, "I have every reason for loving my dear cousin Gerald!"
Presently he caught sight of the miniature of his cousin where it hung above the davenport. "His likeness!" he exclaimed. "The original is not enough for her; she must have this to gaze on when he is not by." He took the miniature off the nail on which it hung and scanned it frowningly. "To think that only this man's life stands between me and fortune--only this one life!" he said. "Were Gerald Brooke to die without heirs, I--even I, his graceless scamp of a cousin--would come into possession of Beechley Towers and six thousand a year! Only this one life!" He let the miniature drop on the hearth, and then ground it to fragments savagely under his heel. "If I could but serve the original as I serve this!" he muttered.
The sound of the shutting of a distant door startled him. He pressed his hands to his forehead for a moment, as though awaking from a confused dream; then he sighed deeply and took up his hat, gloves, and whip. "Adieu, Clara; but we shall meet again," he said aloud. With that he put on his hat and buttoned his coat and walked slowly out by the way he had come.
Two minutes later Mrs. Brooke re-entered the room. She looked round in surprise. "George gone?" she said to herself. "Why did he not wait and see Gerald?" She crossed to the window and looked out. "Yes; there he goes striding through the grass, and evidently not in the most amiable of humours. How strangely he has altered during the last three or four years; how different he is now from what he used to be when we were playmates together! If he had but some profession--something to occupy his mind--he would be far happier than he is. But George is not one to love work of any kind." With that Clara looked at her watch and dismissed Mr. Crofton from her thoughts. "I wish Gerald were back. What can that strange Monsieur Karovsky want with him? What can be the business of importance that has brought him here? I feel as if some misfortune were impending. Such happiness as mine is too perfect to last."
She was crossing the room in search of a book, when her eye was attracted by the fragments of the miniature on the hearth. She was on her knees in a moment. "What is this?" she cried. "Gerald's likeness, and trodden under foot! This is George's doing. Oh, cruel, cruel! What a mean and paltry revenge! It is the portrait Gerald gave me before we were married. I could never like another as I liked this one. Oh, how mean! Gerald must not know--at least not for the present." Tears of mingled anger and sorrow stood in her eyes as she picked up the fragments and locked them away in her desk. She had scarcely accomplished this when she heard her husband's footsteps. She hastily brushed her tears away and turned to greet him with a smile. "And this is what you call being half-an-hour away!" she said as he drew her to him and kissed her.