Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/322

 "You shouldn't have left college," she said, in the manner of a challenge.

"No," he admitted humbly. "However, it can't be helped now." He had no thought of reproaching her for her part in that fiasco.

She asked, in a gentler voice: "Where shall we go?"

"Up the Avenue?" he suggested.

"Very well."

If, an hour earlier, he could have foreseen the perfunctory conversation of that walk, it would have depressed him like a disillusionment; but in the agonized moments of his panic in the boarding-house parlour, he had consented to the mutilation of his hope, he had himself used the knife on it, and he had met her, at the doorway again, aware that she—like Miss Morris, like his father, like all the other agents of opposing circumstance—was an enemy of his philosophy of life; that he must love her without the thought of any reward from her. And he saw this without any sentimental self-pity, without any false heroics, as a thing to be reckoned with in his attempts to realize the future which he had planned.

It gave his manner a tinge of melancholy, as if he were years older than she; and he listened and replied to her, without looking at her, his eyes on the humid-blue vista of the avenue that was so stone-bare in the autumn mist.

She detailed, at great length, the story of her quarrel with her mother; and he gathered from it that Mrs. Richardson, being frivolous and fond of travel, was tired of dragging her daughter about with her, wished her to get married and begrudged her the money spent