“No,” said Tommy.
“Then I’m shocked at her,” said Clementina. “She was in my charge, enjoying my hospitality. She had no business to fall in love with—with my—” she floundered for a second—“with my invalid guest.”
“Pretty sort of invalid I am,” said Tommy, who; through the masquerade of woe, appealed to passers-by, especially to those of the opposite sex, as the embodiment of fair Anglo-Saxon lustiness. “She isn’t to blame, poor dear. I am, and yet, confound it! I’m not—for how could I help it? But what the deuce there is in me, Clementina dear, for the most exquisite thing God ever made to care for, God only knows.”
Clementina put her hand—the glove on it, so different from Etta’s, was thirty sizes too large; it was of white cotton, and new—she had sent the page-boy of the hotel that morning to buy her a pair—she put her gloved hand on his. At the touch he raised his eyes to hers. He saw in them something—he was too young and ingenuous to know what—but something he had not seen in Clementina’s eyes before.
“You’re right, my dear boy,” she said. “God knows. That being so, it is up to Him, as the Americans say, to make good. And He’ll make good. That is, if you really love that little girl.”
“Love her!” cried Tommy. “Why——”
“Yes, yes,” Clementina interrupted hastily. “I’m convinced of it. You needn’t go into raptures.” She had endured much the last few weeks. She felt now that the penance of listening to amatory dithyrambics was supererogatory. “All I want to know is that you love her like a man.”
“That I do,” said Tommy.
“And she loves you?”
Tommy nodded lugubriously. She loved him for nodding.