"Nothing but devoted love could have held you to him in his trouble," said I. "If you did not feel that, your bondage through a hopeless engagement would have been a terrible burden."
"Tell me what he said," she murmured coaxingly. "Is he angry with me? does he complain of me?"
"No: no man could have spoken of you more kindly."
"Is he forgetting me?"
I met her look and smile with a curious thrill that I thought I had lived down years ago.
"I am afraid, Georgy," said I, "that you are not one of those women whom men forget."
"Jack will forget me. He is wedded to his business: he is angry with the world, maddened, desperate. I have walked out behind him at church in Belfield, and he has not seen me: I have met him driving in the streets, and he has not turned his head. The men who once trusted and believed in his father treated him shamefully after his misfortunes came, and Jack resented it: he goes about the place seeing nobody, holding his head high, and showing the men he meets that he asks no favor of any one of them. All the softness has gone out of him."
I told her how wrong her idea of him was, and presently found myself repeating many things that he had said. Before I ended I had even let her hear of our midnight stroll about the place and our look at the gabled room where we believed her to be sleeping. This pleased her.
"That is not unlike you," she remarked with charming complacency, "but I never before heard of Jack's doing anything so poetic."
"Jack is not a man to write poems," said I, "but he is one of the men poets write about. After you had gone up stairs last night Helen sang to her father, and the words of one of her songs were Heine's: it reminded me of Holt beneath your window."