“Then I have made a mistake—I have done you an injustice and must ask your forgiveness. But you know, Fan, what I feel about Captain Horton, and that it is impossible for me to remain for a moment under the same roof with him, and you and Mrs. Chance must not think it strange if I leave you now.”
“No, Miss Starbrow, you shall not cut your visit short on my account,” said the Captain, speaking for the first time and very quietly. “I did not expect you here, and if my presence in the room for a few moments would be so obnoxious to you I shall of course go away.”
“I am so sorry it has happened,” said Fan.
But Miss Starbrow was not willing to let him depart before giving him another taste of her resentment. “Did you imagine, sir, that your presence could be anything but obnoxious to me?” she retorted. “Did you think I had forgotten?”
“No, not that,” he replied.
“What then?” came the quick answer, the sharp tone cutting the senses like a lash.
He hesitated, glancing at her with troubled eyes, and then replied—“I thought, Miss Starbrow, that when you heard that I was trying to live down the past—trying very hard and not unsuccessfully as I imagined—it would have made some difference in your feelings towards me. To win your forgiveness for the wrong I did you has been the one motive I have had for all my strivings since I last saw you. That has been the goal I have had before me—that only. Latterly I have hoped that Miss Eden, who had as much reason to regard me with enmity as yourself, would be my intercessor with you. By a most unhappy chance we have met too soon, and I regret it, I cannot say how much; for you make the task I have set myself seem so much harder than before that I almost despair.”
She made no reply, but after one keen glance at his face turned aside, and stood waiting impatiently, it seemed, for him to go.
He then expressed his regrets to Fan for having come without first writing to ask her permission, and after shaking hands with her and bowing to Constance, turned away. As he moved across the floor Fan kept her eye fixed on Mary's face, and seemed at last about to make an appeal to her, when Constance, standing by her side, and also observing Mary, touched her hand to restrain her.
“Captain Horton,” spoke Mary, and he at once turned back from the door and faced her. “You have come here to see Miss Eden, and I do not wish to drive you away before you have spoken to her. I suppose we can sit in the same room for a few minutes longer.”