Part 29 (1/2)

She pulled herself away from him, sobbing out with a wild earnestness which he found incomprehensible: ”No! No! You can't start yet. You have her kisses on your mouth yet.”

”You didn't seem to mind that before,” he said, suddenly white with anger. ”I don't know why you should start to be jealous of Laura now everything is over.”

”I'm not jealous,” she said. ”It is not that.” Then she stopped short. He must believe what he liked, for she could not betray the secret of a girl whose love, she felt, was finer than her own.

”Well, you have no need to be jealous,” he said. ”She spoke nicely about you. She was awfully decent about it, and hoped you and she would be friends.”

”Oh! I wish we could be,” said Caroline, but deep down in her own consciousness she knew this would never happen; because it is not in human nature for a woman to cease being jealous of another who has done more than herself for the man she loves.

He stood there disconsolately, kicking a pebble. He had come hot-foot to claim her, never antic.i.p.ating a check; and now she seemed to be somehow drifting farther and farther away from him.

”I don't know if you are still thinking about the money Laura lent me,”

he said at last. ”I begin to wish now I hadn't told you. But I wanted to have everything quite straight.” He paused. ”As a matter of fact, I have paid it back. The bank was a bit awkward at first, but I was able to come to an arrangement with them a day or two ago, and I have repaid Laura what she lent me.” He paused again, looking at her almost comically: ”There, I hope you quite understand?”

They were indeed talking to each other more like enemies than lovers; and Caroline seemed to be more than ever withdrawn and aloof--for all her ignorance and simplicity of feeling--when she answered him in an inward brooding tone: ”Yes, I understand.” For she really saw neither G.o.dfrey nor the sh.o.r.e, only Laura coming flushed out of the door marked ”Private” behind the bank counter. For now--at last--she did see where it all led. She had to join issue with Laura to spare the pride of this man whom both loved. His faith in his own power of overcoming difficulties was the foundation on which his life was built, and they must not pull it from under him. She, at any rate, could not so humiliate him.

”The difficulty was only temporary,” he went on, trying to find out what she was waiting for. ”I tried to do too much business for my capital. But I'm bound to get on. We shall be all right.”

”Don't!” she said sharply. ”I don't care about money. I wasn't thinking about that.”

”Then what's the matter?”

She looked at him dumbly, and something in her tear-stained face tugged irresistibly at his heartstrings. ”Don't look like that,” he said.

”Let's forget all that has happened before. You don't mean you will turn me down, too?”