“No, not at all,” she hastened to assure me. “The fact is there was very little love on either side, and we parted quite amicably.”
“As amicably as we did ourselves—eh?”
“No, Frank,” she said with a sudden seriousness, dropping her eyes to the table. “Do not refer to that. With years has come wisdom. We were both foolish, were we not?”
“Perhaps I was when I believed your vow to be a true one,” I responded a trifle bitterly, for I had thought the summer of my life over and at an end.
“Ah, no!” she cried. “I did not come here to reopen an incident that has been so long closed. You love another woman, no doubt.”
“No,” I answered. “I loved you once, until you forsook me. I have not loved since.”
“But I was a mere girl then,” she urged. “Ours was but a midsummer madness—that you’ll surely admit.”
I was silent. I had believed myself proof against all sentiment in this respect, for of late I had thought little, if at all, of my lost love. Yet alone with her at that moment all the bitter past flooded upon me, my wild passion and my shattered hopes, with a vividness that stirred up a great bitterness within me. Not that I loved her now. No. On the contrary, I hated her. She had played others false and treated them just as she had treated me.
“After madness there is always a reaction,” I answered, recollecting how fondly I had once loved her, and how, since the day we parted, my life, even Bohemian as it must ever be in journalistic London, was nevertheless loveless and misanthropic, the life of one whose hopes were shattered and whose joy in living had been sapped. Shenley was but the tomb of those summer recollections. I never now visited the place.
“But all this is very foolish, Frank,” she exclaimed with a calm philosophical air and a smile probably meant to be coquettish. “Why recollect the past?”