“Poor boy!” Felicia exclaimed resentfully. “Poor tattle-tale, going around telling everybody when he made me promise not to tell a soul. That’s the last time I keep a secret.”
That is all the others heard Felicia say, but to me her words meant golden music, and they told me a hundred different things; they healed my wounds, they dispelled the clouds from my soul; but, above all the tumult of my heart, I shouted down to that stupid inner fellow words of self-congratulation, of how well, how wisely, temperately, I had acted throughout, and I thanked Heaven that I was constitutionally unable to make a fool of myself, whatever evil counsellors lodged in the house I call my “self.” But, Felicia, a word from you would have put forty hours more of sound sleep between me and old age! And what business, after all, had Felicia “helping out” that silly boy? A married woman has her home and her husband to think about—besides Felicia is too pretty—and that I was right is abundantly shown by the first thing Felicia said to me in the carriage.
“The idiot,” she confessed, “told me before he went off to propose to Mildred that he didn’t care whether she accepted him or not!” And I only held Felicia’s hand very tight.
“I didn’t think,” Felicia went on in a wan little voice, “that you cared.”
There was something she wanted me to answer very much, and not being quite sure what it was, I still kept silence—not wanting to say the wrong thing.
“I’m not proud anyway,” she went on bravely. “Couldn’t you say them just once—the words that are so hard to say?”
“Oh, I was, Felicia,” I cried, “awfully jealous!” And I knew, now that it was all over, that I had never spoken a truer word. Felicia breathed a long sigh.
“I hoped you were,” she said.
“Couldn’t you see?” I asked.
“Not until you told me,” she answered, always in her meek little voice, as meek and submissive as ever it was in the conversations I invented. “I hoped you might be, but you never said anything.”