"You could easily have found out my whereabouts if you had called upon mamma. I should not have expected you to be in Belfield without going near our house."
"Mrs. Lenox has too often snubbed me in my boyhood for me to count upon her grace now," I returned. "But I hope your mother is very well."
But it was very droll to me that I had embarked upon something like an adventure for the sake of talking about old Mrs. Lenox. Still, Miss Georgy was well worth coming out to see with the flush of healthy sleep still upon cheek and lip and the morning light in her eyes.
"Mamma is well," said she soberly. "Poor papa too: though he is worked to death, he is still quite well."
"What does he do, then?" I asked. I knew that he was one of the book-keepers at the factories, but I wanted her to be the first to speak Jack's name.
"As soon as Mr. John Holt went into the business," she returned, very coolly, "he gave my father a position. He had promised to do it years before, and you know how well Jack keeps all his promises."
"Jack is faithful and true," I said, looking at her keenly. "No one will ever be able to say of him, 'That man has wronged me.'"
"What did he say about me?" she demanded suddenly, stopping short in her walk and facing me. "I shall have no disguises with you, Floyd: you know me too well. I never really loved Jack, good, kind and noble although I recognize him to be. When he offered me my freedom I took it. How could I have endured to wait for him, ruined, disgraced as he was, through the uncertainty and pain of years? It is impossible that he should be in a position to marry until my youth is passed."
Her voice was so tremulous and pleading, her eyes and lips so eloquent, that she needed no vindication. I pitied Jack more than ever, but still I no longer blamed her.
"You men have a hundred chances," she went on. "If the first fails you, you have no reason for despondency, for a better one is sure to come. We poor women find our golden opportunity but once. Do not call me mercenary or false. I was neither. I had been talked into a belief that I ought to marry Jack, but when the trial came all the potential reasons failed. Had I kept my engagement to him, I should have been a clog, an encumbrance, upon him: he is better off without me."