“Well, I suppose it’s your own fault,” she remarked, with just a touch of the vindictive. She had emptied her heart of heaven and thrown it at the boy’s feet, and he had not so much as said “thank you.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Tommy.
“That’s just like a man,” said Clementina. “Every one of you is ready enough to cry peccavi, but it’s invariably somebody else’s maxima culpa.”
“I didn’t cry peccavi at all,” said Tommy. “I suppose I had better do so, though,” he added, after a gloomy pause. “I’ve been a cad. I’ve been abusing your hospitality. Any man of honour would kick me all over the place. But I swear to you it was not my fault. How the deuce could I help it?”
“Help what, my good Tommy?”
Tommy dug his stick fiercely in the gravel. “Help falling in love with Etta. There! now it’s out. Of course you had no idea of it.”
“Of course not,” said Clementina; with a wry twist of her mouth, not knowing whether to shriek with insane laughter or with pain at the final cut of the whip with which she had flagellated the offending Eve. But her grim sense of humour prevailed, though her strength allowed it to manifest itself only in the twinkling of her keen eyes.
“I don’t know what you can think of me,” said Tommy.
She made no reply, reflecting on the success of her comedy. As she had planned, so had it fallen out. She had saved her own self-respect—more, her self-honour—and she had saved him from making muddy disaster of his own life. The simplicity of the boy touched her deeply. The dear, ostrich reasoning of youth! Of course she had no idea of it! She looked at him, sitting there, as a man sometimes looks at a very pure woman—with a pitying reverence in her eyes. But Tommy did not see the look, contemplating as he was the blackness of his turpitude. For each of them it was a wholesome moment.
“You see, not only was I your guest, but I held a kind of position of trust,” continued Tommy. “She was, as it were, in my charge. If I had millions, I oughtn’t to have fallen in love with her. As I’m absolutely penniless, it’s a crime.”