“Only fancy, mother, I haven’t seen Sybil Deighton since I left school. And now she’s married. That’s her husband she’s with. Rather a nice boy, isn’t he?”
And she threw herself into the lounge-chair next to me.
Not until an hour later when Mrs. Shaylor had bidden us good-night and we had retired into one of the cosy corners that I ventured to speak of Stanley.
“No, Mr. Yelverton,” she said shaking her beautiful head sadly, and raising her big gray eyes to mine. “I have heard nothing—not a word. If Stanley is still alive he would surely send me a reassuring word. I—I begin to think that he must be dead!”
Stanley Audley dead! If that were so I should be free to love her and to win her if I could. The very thought caused my heart to leap. I even found myself cherishing the wish that it might be true. Yet a moment later I began to despise myself for entertaining such an unworthy thought. It was not “playing the game” according to the right traditions of the school in which I had been brought up. And so far, at any rate, I had tried to conform to the code of personal honor that, with many men, is a far more powerful rule of conduct than most forms of religious belief.
Though I led the conversation several times in the direction of Harold Ruthen, Thelma said nothing of his visits to Bexhill. I was irritated because she would not be frank with me. At length I thought it would be best to speak plainly and told her of my adventure in Lancaster Gate, of course without mentioning the discovery of the forged bank-notes.
“But, surely it could not have been Stanley!” she exclaimed excitedly. “Why should he want to avoid you, of all men? He could not imagine you as anything else but a friend!”
“Equally so, why does he not let you know his whereabouts?” I asked in turn.
She shook her head in dismay.
Then suddenly, with an expression of despair in her eyes, she put out her thin white hand with the wedding ring upon it, and pointing to it, said in a low voice—