Part 67 (2/2)
”Please,” she begged, with uplifted eyes of entreaty. ”She--she didn't tell me the truth about that interview with your reporter. It was true; but she made me think it wasn't. She confessed to me, and she feels very badly. So do I. I believed that you had deliberately made that up, about her saying that she didn't turn back because she wanted to catch a train. I believed, too, that the editorial was written after our--our talk. I'm sorry.”
Hal stood above her, looking rather stern, and a little old and worn, she thought.
”If that is an apology, it is accepted,” he said with surface politeness.
To him she was, in that moment, a light-minded woman apologizing for the petty misdeed, and paying no heed to the graver wrong that she had done him. Jeannette Willard could have set him right in a word; could have shown him what the girl felt, unavowedly to herself but with underlying conviction, that for so great an offense no apology could suffice; nothing short of complete surrender. But Mrs. Willard was not there to help out. She was waiting hopefully, outside.
”And that is all?” he said, after a pause, with just a shade of contempt in his voice.
”All,” she said lightly, ”unless you choose to tell me how the 'Clarion'
is getting on.”
”As well as could be expected. We pay high for our principles. But thus far we've held to them. You should read the paper.”
”I do.”
”To expect your approval would be too much, I suppose.”
”No. In many ways I like it. In fact, I think I'll renew my subscription.”
It was innocently said, without thought of the old playful bargain between them, which had terminated with the mailing of the withered arbutus. But to Hal it seemed merely a brazen essay in coquetry; an attempt to reconst.i.tute the former relation, for her amus.e.m.e.nt.
”The subscription lists are closed, on the old terms,” he said crisply.
”Oh, you couldn't have thought I meant that!” she whispered; but he was already halfway down the room, on the echo of his ”Good-afternoon, Miss Elliot.”
As before, he turned at the door. And he carried with him, to muse over in the depths of his outraged heart once more, the mystery of that still and desperate smile. Any woman could have solved it for him. Any, except, possibly, Esme Elliot.
”It didn't come out as I hoped, Festus,” said the sorrowful little Mrs.
Willard to her husband that evening. ”I don't know that Hal will ever believe in her again. How can he be so--so stupidly unforgiving!”
”Always the man's fault, of course,” said her big husband comfortably.
”No. She's to blame. But it's the fault of men in general that Norrie is what she is; the men of this town, I mean. No man has ever been a man with Norrie Elliot.”
”What have they been?”
”Mice. It's a tradition of the place. They lie down in rows for her to trample on. So of course she tramples on them.”
”Well, I never trampled on mice myself,” observed Festus Willard. ”It sounds like uncertain footing. But I'll bet you five pounds of your favorite candy against one of your very best kisses, that if she undertakes to make a footpath of Hal Surtaine she'll get her feet hurt.”
”Or her heart,” said his wife. ”And, oh, Festus dear, it's such a real, warm, dear heart, under all the spoiled-childness of her.”
CHAPTER XXV
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