Page:Anthony Hope - The Kings Mirror.djvu/312

 much my face told him, but I did not look at him unkindly.

"I must go, if I may," he said addressing me. "I promised to ride with Vohrenlorf, and the time is past."

He bowed to Elsa and to me.

"We shall see you this afternoon?" she asked.

He bowed again in acquiescence, but with an air of discomfort. Elsa looked at him, and from him to me. She flushed again, opened her lips, but did not speak; then she bent her head down, and the blush spread from neck to forehead.

"Go, my dear friend, go," said I.

He looked at me as though he would have spoken, almost as though he would have protested or excused himself, inadmissible as such a thing plainly was. I smiled at him, but waved my hand to dismiss him. He turned and walked quickly away along the broad grass path. I watched him till he was out of sight; all the while I was conscious of an utter motionlessness in Elsa's figure beside me.

We must have sat there a long while in that unbroken eloquent silence, hardly moving, never looking at one another. For her I was full of grief; a wayward thing it was, indeed, of fate to fashion out of Varvilliers' pleasant friendship this new weapon of attack. She had been on the way to contentment—at least to resignation—but was now thrust back. And she was ashamed. Poor child! why, in Heaven's name, should she be ashamed? Should she not better have been ashamed of a fancy so ill directed as to light on me when Varvilliers was by? For myself I seemed to see rising before me the need for a new deception, a hoodwinking of all the world, a secret that none must know or suspect, that she and I must