“Matter! The most infernal, disgraceful, and degrading business that has ever come to my knowledge. ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth!’—well, I’ve found out what that means. Here am I, who have sacrificed myself, sacrificed everything on earth, for the sake of an ungrateful rascal who deserts me at a moment’s notice. And then you ask me if anything is the matter!”
She had risen from her chair and was looking at him with a troubled expression, with the fingers of one hand trembling nervously at her throat. In the storm of words she had caught only one or two; one of them she had caught particularly. “Deserted!” she whispered. “I don’t understand you.”
“Well, there’s not much mystery about it, I should think,” he cried brutally. “Brian has gone.”
She looked at him in silence for a moment with a sudden fear whitening her face; then a little laugh crept to her lips and trembled there, as though she would cheat herself with the thought that the man was jesting. “But where has he gone?” she asked lightly. “Have you been quarrelling with him again?”
“Quarrel? There has been no question of quarrelling. The fellow has simply sneaked away and left me—I mean us—in the lurch. I suppose you know what it means when rats desert the sinking ship, don’t you? Well, we are sinking, and away goes the first rat.”
She came swiftly across to him and caught him by the arm and looked into his face. “Do you mean what you say? Where is Brian? I won’t believe—oh, I’ll go and find him!”
Halfway to the door his voice arrested her. “You may shriek the house down and you won’t find him. He’s miles away. Egad! when I come to think of it”—Mr. Robert Carlaw scratched his chin and smiled—“he’s a pretty cool hand. And I’m not sure that it isn’t what his poor old father would have done under the circumstances.” He turned over the letter he held in his hands and looked at it. “And the phrasing is beautiful, quite the sort of thing that would grace his biography, you know.”
She came back slowly from the door and pointed to the letter. “Is that from Brian?” she asked in a whisper.
“Yes,” he replied, still looking at it with a fond smile.
“May I see it? What does he say?”