proved too much for you, go you must.” She was silent for a moment, and then said ironically, “Does this mean that we are not to have the honour of your distinguished company on our trip?… Really,” she said curtly, “I wish you’d try to make up your mind what you’re going to do…. The suspense, darling, is growing quite unbearable. If you’d try to break it to us gently,” she went on poisonously, “I beg of you to let the blow fall now, and not to spare us any longer. After all,” she said with a kind of evil drollery, “we may manage to survive the shock…. Really, I should like to know,” she said sharply, as he did not answer. “If you’re not going, we’ll get someone else to take your place—we wanted a fourth party to help share in the expenses,” she added venomously, “and I’d like to know at once what your intentions are.”
He stared at her with a smouldering face and with a swelter of hot and ugly anger in his heart, but as usual, her envenomed attack was too quick and sudden for him. Before he could answer, even as his tongue was blundering at a hot reply, she turned swiftly away, and with an air of resignation, said to Starwick:
“Will you try to find out what his intentions are? I can’t find out what he wants to do. Apparently,” she concluded in a rich, astounded voice, “—apparently, your young friend is tongue-tied.” She walked away, contained and beautifully self-possessed as ever, save for two angry spots of colour in her face.
When she had gone, Starwick turned to him, and said with quiet reproof:
“You ought to let her know. You really ought, you know.”
“All right!” he said quickly and hotly, “I’m letting you know right now. I’m not going.”
Starwick said nothing for a moment, then with a quiet, weary, and sorrowful resignation, he said:
“I’m sorry, Gene.”
The other said nothing, but just stood looking at Starwick with eyes which were cold and hard and ugly with their hate. Starwick’s quiet words, the almost Christ-like humility with which he uttered them, now seemed to him to be nothing but the mask of a sneering arrogance of pride and contemptuous assurance, the badge of his immeasurable good fortune. With cold, measuring eyes of hate he looked at Starwick’s soft and graceful throat, the languid indolence of his soft, voluptuously graceful figure, and with murderous calculation he thought: “How easy it would
