“Ah, Mrs. Brinkley,” said one of the ladies, “it would be of no use for you to preach broken engagements to any one who saw you and Mr. Brinkley together.”  They fell upon her, one after another, and mocked her with the difference between her doctrine and practice; and they were all the more against her because they had been perhaps a little put down by her whimsical sayings.

“Yes,” she admitted.  “But we’ve been thirty years coming to the understanding that you all admire so much; and do you think it was worth the time?”

XXI.

Mavering kept up until he took leave of the party of young people who had come over on the ferry-boat to Eastport for the frolic of seeing him off.  It was a tremendous tour de force to accept their company as if he were glad of it, and to respond to all their gay nothings gaily; to maintain a sunny surface on his turbid misery.  They had tried to make Alice come with them, but her mother pleaded a bad headache for her; and he had to parry a hundred sallies about her, and from his sick heart humour the popular insinuation that there was an understanding between them, and that they had agreed together she should not come.  He had to stand about on the steamboat wharf and listen to amiable innuendoes for nearly an hour before the steamer came in from St. John.  The fond adieux of his friends, their offers to take any message back, lasted during the interminable fifteen minutes that she lay at her moorings, and then he showed himself at the stern of the boat, and waved his handkerchief in acknowledgment of the last parting salutations on shore.

When it was all over, he went down into his state-room, and shut himself in, and let his misery rollover him.  He felt as if there were a flood of it, and it washed him to and fro, one gall of shame, of self-accusal, of bitterness, from head to foot.  But in it all he felt no resentment toward Alice, no wish to wreak any smallest part of his suffering upon her.  Even while he had hoped for her love, it seemed to him that he had not seen her in all that perfection which she now had in irreparable loss.  His soul bowed itself fondly over the thought of her; and, stung as he was by that last cruel word of hers, he could not upbraid her.  That humility which is love casting out selfishness, the most egotistic of the passions triumphing over itself—­Mavering experienced it to the full.  He took all the blame.  He could not see that she had ever encouraged him to hope for her love, which now appeared a treasure heaven—­far beyond his scope; he could only call himself fool, and fool, and fool, and wonder that he could have met her in the remoteness of that morning with the belief that but for the follies of last night she might have answered him differently.  He believed now that, whatever had gone before, she must still have rejected him.  She had treated his presumption very leniently; she had really spared him.