"You will have thought me hard," he burst out at length, as they
were nearing the drawing-room windows and the garden-door. "I
never can manage to express what I feel--somehow I always fall to
philosophizing--but I am sorry for you. Yes, I am; it's beyond my
power to help you, as far as altering facts goes, but I can feel for
you, in a way which it's best not to talk about, for it can do no
good. Remember how sorry I am for you! I shall often be thinking of
you, though I daresay it's best not to talk about it again."
She said, "I know you are sorry," under her breath, and then she
broke away, and ran indoors, and upstairs to the solitude of her own
room. He went straight to his mother, who was sitting before the
untasted luncheon, as much annoyed by the mysterious unpunctuality
of her visitor as she was capable of being with anything; for she
had heard that Mr. Gibson had been, and was gone, and she could not
discover if he had left any message for her; and her anxiety about
her own health, which some people esteemed hypochondriacal, always
made her particularly craving for the wisdom which might fall from
her doctor's lips.
"Where have you been, Roger? Where is Molly?--Miss Gibson, I mean,"
for she was careful to keep up a barrier of forms between the young
man and young woman who were thrown together in the same household.
"I've been out dredging. (By the way, I left my net on the terrace
walk.) I found Miss Gibson sitting there, crying as if her heart
would break. Her father is going to be married again."
"Married again! You don't say so."
"Yes, he is; and she takes it very hardly, poor girl. Mother, I think
if you could send some one to her with a glass of wine, a cup of tea,
or something of that sort--she was very nearly fainting--"
"I'll go to her myself, poor child," said Mrs. Hamley, rising.
"Indeed you must not," said he, laying his hand upon her arm. "We
have kept you waiting already too long; you are looking quite pale.
Hammond can take it," he continued, ringing the bell. She sate down
again, almost stunned with surprise.
"Whom is he going to marry?"
"I don't know. I didn't ask, and she didn't tell me."
"That's so like a man. Why, half the character of the affair lies in
the question of who it is that he is going to marry."
"I daresay I ought to have asked. But somehow I'm not a good one
on such occasions. I was as sorry as could be for her, and yet I
couldn't tell what to say."