“Nothing much, except to confess that I have made a precious idiot of myself,” replied Launce with an uneasy laugh. “Now that matters have come to this pass, I need scarcely say that any questions you may choose to put to me shall be answered truthfully and to the best of my ability.”
And so by degrees, and by way of answers to his father’s interrogatories, the story of Hetty Blair was told.
“Your conduct has indeed been that of an idiot—no milder term is applicable to it,” remarked the brewer when he had brought his string of questions to an end. “That you have been headstrong and extravagant, I have long known—known it to my cost—but that you should have displayed such an utter lack of common sense in your dealings with this governessing girl, is what I should have found it impossible to believe had not facts, coupled with your own confession, proved to me how utterly mistaken I was. I have lost every atom of confidence in you, and from to-day——”
“It does not follow, because a man has made an egregious ass of himself once, that he must necessarily do so a second time,” broke in Launce, a little sullenly. “Indeed, after the lesson I have just had read me, it would be absurd to suppose that I should ever commit myself in a similar way again.”
“Not in the same way, perhaps, but in some other way equally as reprehensible. It is only wise men who profit by experience. Fools never learn. In which of the two categories do you assume to class yourself?”
Launce bit his lip, but refrained from replying.
Launce Keymer had scarcely been twenty-four hours at home before the nursemaid, Doris King, who was under promise to do so, had intimated the fact by letter to Miss Hetty Blair. Other notes followed, in which Hetty was informed that her former lover was going about just as he had been in the habit of doing before he left home, as gay, as smiling, and apparently as free from care as ever he had been. And so, indeed, he was, for Launce never dreamt that Hetty either could or would trouble him further. When all was said and done, he looked upon it that he had escaped handsomely out of both his entanglements, and as the particulars in neither case had come to the knowledge of the little world in which he habitually lived and moved, it seemed to him that he was perfectly at liberty to revert to that pleasant, social, dégagé mode of life to which all his inclinations tended, and of which unlimited and irresponsible flirtation formed an essential factor.
Ethel Thursby had said to Hetty: “The service you have done me is greater than you know. Not only have you shown me the kind of man Launce Keymer is, but you have opened my eyes to something else. When he asked me to become his wife it was in the belief that I should one day inherit my aunts’ money, but within a few hours of his discovery that they had lost nearly all they were worth and that, consequently, there was no prospect of my inheriting anything, he left home suddenly and without coming to bid me goodbye, and from then till now no word of any kind has reached me from him. The reason of his silence is now made plain to me. He intends me to understand by it that he wishes our engagement to be considered as at an end—and so, indeed, from this hour it is.”
These words recurred to Hetty again and again, and the oftener she thought them over the more clearly she saw that, instead of having, as she had hoped and intended, inflicted on her former lover an injury from which he would not readily recover, she had unwittingly rendered him an essential service by causing Miss Thursby of her own accord to break off an engagement towards the rupture of which he himself had already taken the first steps. The reflection was a mortifying one, and Hetty ground her sharp white teeth in impotent anger as often as it forced itself upon her. Then, one day, she bethought herself that two of Launce Keymer’s letters were still in her possession, which, as breathing a more ardent attachment and being studded with more terms of endearment, she had chosen from the others to place under her pillow at night and help to bring her happy dreams. “If I have failed to make him suffer in the way I intended,” she said to herself; “that is all the more reason why I should make him suffer in some other way.”
Hetty had flirted with more than one would-be lover before Launce Keymer appeared on the scene and carried all before him. The one she had been most inclined to favour was a young solicitor’s clerk, Ambrose Lydd by name. A week seldom went by without their passing each other in the street, and in the glances he cast on her Hetty read clearly enough that he was still no less infatuated with her than he had ever been. To him she now wrote a brief note, asking him to call upon her at her home the first evening he should find himself disengaged.