Page:Outlawandlawmak00praegoog.djvu/40

28 and her sweet serious eyes met his. "Mr. Hallett," she said, I think you ought to make haste."

"Tell me what I ought to do, Lady Horace."

"I think you ought to make Elsie understand how much you care for her."

"I have tried to do that. You were wrong. She doesn't care for me."

"I thought she did," said Ina faltering. The break in her voice reminded him of the break in it that day. Perhaps she was thinking of this, too. She went on in a different tone, "You must not judge Elsie as you would another girl. She is horribly proud, and she is horribly reserved, and she is horribly perverse. Oh, I know all my Elsie's faults."

"Tell me, Lady Horace, what made you think that she cared for me?"

Ina hesitated, and her soft colour came again. "I don't think I can do that quite, Mr. Hallett."

"Tell me," he urged.

She looked at him, and turned away her head. "Yes, I'll tell you," she said, in a forced sort of voice. "It was—do you remember that day at Tunimba—before I was engaged—when you told me that you were so fond of Elsie?"

"Yes," he answered, and his voice too was strained. "It was just after that, that Horace—that I began to think I might marry Horace. One day when Elsie teased me about it—she never cared very much for Horace, you know, though Mammie liked him so much—we spoke of you—and Elsie told me that you were the only man she had ever known whom she could fancy herself marrying. She told me that she had once fancied—before Horace came on the scene, you know"—Ina laughed a little unsteadily—"that you had had a—a regard for me. It was absurd, wasn't it?—and that the idea had made her unhappy and snappish to me, and that she had hated herself for minding. But she had minded. That meant a great deal from Elsie."

At that moment Lord Horace and Elsie came in.

"Mr. Hallett," she exclaimed, "I have been telling