At that moment Lady Saunderson's brougham flashes past. She looks out and gives him a brilliant smile, half questioning, half pitying, a smile that goads him to a feeling of impotent desperation.
"I am a lucky fellow--by the powers I am!" he mutters fiercely, with clinched fists.
"Jack, Jack, where are you going? Where's your hat? What's the matter?"
Little Emily Deane's astonished voice recalls him to his senses. He puts up his hand to his sleek dripping head and retraces his steps mechanically, Emily trotting by his side.
"Is there anything the matter with you, Jack? You look so hot and funny! Have you been fighting with Cissy?--for she looks so funny too. Her face is like fire, she would scarcely speak to me, and, when I leaned over her, I saw she was crying like anything."
"Crying?" he says quickly. "Are you sure?"
"Yes. She didn't want me to notice, and pushed me away quite crossly; but I saw great fat tears splashing down on the music she was copying, and swelling out the notes. Did you say anything to annoy her? Cissy never cries, you know--not even when she had two big teeth pulled out, or when she was reading the death of Little Nell. Bill says she's the dryest girl he ever met."
Everard stands for a moment hesitating, hat in hand; then he walks back quickly and stealthily to the room where Cicely sits, her face hidden on her outstretched arms, shedding the bitterest, most shamefaced tears of her life. The poor child does not doubt but that she betrayed her secret to him from whom she would have guarded it at the cost of her life, and that he, actuated by a sense of pitiful kindness, resolved to assure her happiness at the expense of his own.
She feels sore, wounded, insulted, all the sunshine gone from her sky. She knows that she can never again look with anything but shame and pain into the bright face she loves so well, never again listen in peace to the only voice that can ever reach her heart. She knows she has lost her lover, her friend, her self-respect, at one blow; and the cross she is called upon thus suddenly to bear seems too heavy for her slight shoulders.
At this crisis Everard steals in softly, closing the door, drops upon his knees by her side, put his arms round her neck, his face close to hers, and whispers eagerly, before she can repulse him--