'I mean, is it too late? I mean, can you really forgive me? Oh, Bill'—she stopped herself by the fraction of a second from adding 'you idiot'—'can't we be the same again to each other? Can't we—pretend all this has never happened?'
Exasperating as Bill's wooden failure to play the scene in the spirit in which her imagination had conceived it was to Claire, several excuses may be offered for him: He had opened the evening with a shattering blow at his faith in woman. He had walked twenty miles at a rapid pace. He had heard shots and found a corpse, and carried the latter by the tail across country. Finally, he had had the stunning shock of discovering that Elizabeth Boyd loved him. He was not himself. He found a difficulty in concentrating. With the result that, in answer to this appeal from a beautiful girl whom he had once imagined that he loved, all he could find to say was: 'How do you mean?'
Claire, never an adept at patience, just succeeded in swallowing the remark that sprang into her mind. It was incredible to her that a man could exist who had so little intuition. She had not anticipated the necessity of being compelled to put the substance of her meaning in so many blunt words, but it seemed that only so could she make him understand.
'I mean, can't we be engaged again, Bill?'
Bill's overtaxed brain turned one convulsive hand-spring, and came to rest with a sense of having dislocated itself. This was too much. This was not right. No fellow at the end of a hard evening ought to have to grapple with this sort of thing. What on earth did she mean, springing questions like that on him? How could they be engaged? She was going to marry someone else, and so was he. Something of these thoughts he managed to put into words:
'But you're engaged to—'
'I've broken my engagement with Mr Pickering.'
'Great Scot! When?'
'To-night. I found out his true character. He is cruel and treacherous. Something happened—it may sound nothing to you, but it gave me an insight into what he really was. Polly Wetherby had a little monkey, and just because it bit Mr Pickering he shot it.'
'Pickering!'
'Yes. He wasn't the sort of man I should have expected to do a mean, cruel thing like that. It sickened me. I gave him back his ring then and there. Oh, what a relief it was! What a fool I was ever to have got engaged to such a man.'
Bill was puzzled. He was one of those simple men who take their fellows on trust, but who, if once that trust is shattered, can never recover it. Like most simple men, he was tenacious of ideas when he got them, and the belief that Claire was playing fast and loose was not lightly to be removed from his mind. He had found her out during his self-communion that night, and he could never believe her again. He had the feeling that there was something behind what she was saying. He could not put his finger on the clue, but that there was a clue he was certain.
'I only got engaged to him out of pique. I was angry with you, and—Well, that's how it happened.'
Still Bill could not believe. It was plausible. It sounded true. And yet some instinct told him that it was not true. And while he waited, perplexed, Claire made a false step.
The thing had been so close to the top of her mind ever since she had come to the knowledge of it that it had been hard for her to keep it down. Now she could keep it down no longer.
'How wonderful about old Mr Nutcombe, Bill!' she said.
A vast relief rolled over Bill. Despite his instinct, he had been wavering. But now he understood. He had found the clue.
'You got my letter, then?'
'Yes; it was forwarded on from the theatre. I got it to-night.'
Too late she realized what she had said and the construction that an intelligent man would put on it. Then she reflected that Bill was not an intelligent man. She shot a swift glance at him. To all appearances he had suspected nothing.
'It went all over the place,' she hurried on. 'The people at the Portsmouth theatre sent it to the London office, who sent it home, and mother mailed it on to me.'
'I see.'
There was a silence. Claire drew a step nearer.
'Bill!' she said softly.
Bill shut his eyes. The moment had come which he had dreaded. Not even the thought that she was crooked, that she had been playing with him, could make it any better. She was a woman and he was a man. That was all that mattered, and nothing could alter it.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'It's impossible.'
Claire stared at him in amazement. She had not been prepared for this. He met her eyes, but every nerve in his body was protesting.
'Bill!'
'I'm sorry.
'But, Bill!'
He set his teeth. It was just as bad as he had thought it would be.
'But, Bill, I've explained. I've told you how—'
'I know.'
Claire's eyes opened wide.
