Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/306

298 always too careful of yourself and your own poor feelings—you never could brace yourself up to a shower-bath of contempt and hard usage, so you’ve saved your feelings and lost—not much, I suppose—you couldn’t.”

“But——” he began, not looking up; and I laughed at him.

“Go on,” I said.

“Well—she was engaged to him——”

“Pah—you thought you were too good to be rejected.”

He was very pale, and when he was pale, the tan on his skin looked sickly. He regarded me with his dark eyes, which were now full of misery and a child’s big despair.

“And nothing else,” I completed, with which the little, exhausted gunboat of my anger wrecked and sank utterly. Yet no thoughts would spread sail on the sea of my pity: I was like water that heaves with yearning, and is still.

Leslie was very ill for some time. He had a slight brain fever, and was delirious, insisting that Lettie was leaving him. She stayed most of her days at Highclose.

One day in June he lay resting on a deck chair in the shade of the cedar, and she was sitting by him. It was a yellow, sultry day, when all the atmosphere seemed inert, and all things were languid.

“Don’t you think, dear,” she said, “it would be better for us not to marry?”

He lifted his head nervously from the cushions; his face was emblazoned with a livid red bar on a field of white, and he looked worn, wistful.