“It was a stupid thing to say. Please consider
it unsaid.”
The silence deepened, till she broke it again—
“I see Mr. Radowitz sometimes. Won’t
you like to know that he is composing a symphony for
his degree? He is always working at it. It
makes him happy—at least—contented.”
“Yes, I am glad. But nothing can ever make
up to him. I know that.”
“No—nothing,” she admitted
sadly.
“Or to me!”
Constance started. They had reached the last
gate.
Falloden threw himself off his horse to open it and
as she rode through, she looked down into his face.
Its proud regularity of feature, its rich colour,
its brilliance, seemed to her all blurred and clouded.
A flashing insight showed her the valley of distress
and humiliation through which this man had been passing.
His bitter look, at once of challenge and renunciation,
set her trembling; she felt herself all weakness;
and suddenly the woman in her—dumbly, unguessed—held
out its arms.
But he knew nothing of it. Rather her attitude
seemed to him one of embarrassment—even
of hauteur. It was suddenly intolerable
to him to seem to be asking for her pity. He
raised his hat, coldly gave her a few directions as
to her road home, and closed the gate behind her.
She bowed and in another minute he was cantering away
from her, towards the sunset.
Connie went on blindly, the reins on her horse’s
neck, the passionate tears dropping on her hands.
Douglas Falloden rode home rapidly after parting from
Connie. Passion, impatience, bitter regret consumed
him. He suffered, and could not endure to suffer.
That life, which had grown up with him as a flattering
and obsequious friend, obeying all his whims, yielding
to all his desires, should now have turned upon him
in this traitorous way, inflicting such monstrous
reprisals and rebuffs, roused in him the astonishment
and resentment natural to such a temperament.
He, too, drew rein for a moment at the spot where
Connie had looked out over Flood Castle and its valley.
The beautiful familiar sight produced in him now only
a mingling of pain and irritation. The horrid
thing was settled, decided. There was no avoiding
ruin, or saving his inheritance. Then why these
long delays, these endless discomforts and humiliations?
The lawyers prolonged things because it paid them to
do so; and his poor father wavered and hesitated from
day to day, because physically and morally he was
breaking up. If only his father and mother would
have cleared out of Flood at once—they
were spending money they could not possibly afford
in keeping it up—and had left him, Douglas,
to do the odious things, pay the creditors, sell the
place, and sweep up the whole vast mess, with the
help of the lawyers, it would have been infinitely
best. His own will felt itself strong and determined
