slight failing of his voice at the end helped Irene to speak collectedly.
"Chance was in my favour, too. I came down to the beck, hoping I might meet you."
She saw his hand move, the fingers clutch together. Before he could say anything, she continued:
"I want to tell you of an ill-natured story that has reached my ears. Not to discuss it; I know it is untrue. Your two brothers--do you know that they speak spitefully of you?"
"I didn't know it. I don't think I have given them cause."
"I am very sure you haven't. But I want you to know about it, and I shall tell you the facts. After the death of my aunt, Mrs. Hannaford, you got from the hands of Daniel Otway a packet of her letters; he bargained with you, and you paid his price, wishing those letters to be seen by my father and my cousin Olga, whose minds they would set at rest. Now, Daniel Otway is telling people that you never paid the sum you promised him, and that, being in poverty, he vainly applies to you for help."
She saw his hand grasp a twig that hung near him, and drag it rudely down; she did not look at his face.
"I should have thought," Piers answered with grave composure, "that nothing Daniel Otway said could concern me. I see it isn't so. It must have troubled you, for you to speak of it."
"It has; I thought about it. I rejected it as a falsehood."
"There's a double falsehood. I paid him the price he asked, on the day he asked it, and I have since"--he checked himself--"I have not refused him help in his poverty."
Irene's heart glowed within her. Even thus, and not otherwise, would she have desired him to refute the slander. It was a test she had promised herself; she could have laughed for joy. Her voice betrayed this glad emotion.
"Let him say what he will; it doesn't matter now. But how comes it that he is poor?"
"That I should like to know." Piers threw a pebble into the still, brown water near him. "Five years ago, he came into a substantial sum of money. I suppose--it went very quickly. Daniel is not exactly a prudent man."
"I imagine not," remarked Irene, allowing herself a glimpse of his countenance, which she found to be less calm than his tone. "Let us have done with him. Five years ago," she added, with soft accents, "some of that money ought to have been yours, and you received nothing."
"Nothing was legally due to me," he answered, in a voice lower than hers.
"That I know. I mention it--you will forgive me?--because I have sometimes feared that you might explain to yourself wrongly my failure to reply when you sent me those verses, long ago. I have thought, lately, that you might suppose I knew certain facts at that time. I didn't; I only learnt them afterwards. At no time would it have made any difference."
Piers could not speak.
"Look!" said Irene, in a whisper, pointing.
A great dragon-fly, a flash of blue, had dropped on to the surface of the pool, and lay floating. As they watched it rose, to drop again upon a small stone amid a shallow current; half in, half out of, the sunny water, it basked.
"Oh, how lovely everything is!" exclaimed Irene, in a voice that quivered low. "How perfect a day!"
"It was weather like this when I first saw you," said Piers. "Earlier, but just as bright. My memory of you has always lived in sunshine. I saw you first from my window; you were standing in the garden at Ewell; I heard your voice. Do you remember telling the story of Thibaut Rossignol?"
"Oh yes, yes!"
"Is he still with your father?"
"Thibaut? Why, Thibaut is an institution. I can't imagine our house without him. Do you know that he always calls me Mademoiselle Irene?"
"Your name is beautiful in any language. I wonder how many times I have repeated it to myself? And thought, too, so often of its meaning; longed, for _that_--and how vainly!"
"Say the name--now," she faltered.
"Irene!--Irene!"
"Why, you make music of it! I never knew how musical it sounded. Hush! look at that thing of light and air!"
The dragon-fly had flashed past them. This way and that it darted above the shining water, then dropped once more, to float, to sail idly with its gossamer wings.
Piers stole nearer. He sat on a stone by her side.
"Irene!"
"Yes. I like the name when you say it."
"May I touch your hand?"
Still gazing at the dragon-fly, as if careless of what she did, she held her hand to him. Piers folded it in both his own.
"May I hold it as long as I live?"
"Is that a new thought of yours?" she asked, in a voice that shook as it tried to suggest laughter in her mind.
"The newest! The most daring and the most glorious I ever had."
"Why, then I have been mistaken," she said softly, for an instant meeting his eyes. "I fancied I owed you something for a wrong I did, without meaning it, more than eight years gone by."
"That thought had come to you?" Piers exclaimed, with eyes gleaming.
"Indeed it had. I shall be more than half sorry if I have to lose it."
"How foolish I was! What wild, monstrous folly! How could you have dreamt for a moment that such a one as I was could dare to love you?--Irene, you did me no wrong. You gave me the ideal of my life--something I should never lose from my heart and mind--something to live towards! Not a hope; hope would have been madness. I have loved you without hope; loved you because I had found the only one I could love--the one I must love--on and on to the end."
She laid her free hand upon his that clasped the other, and bowed him to her reasoning mood.
"Let me speak of other things--that have to be made plain between you and me. First of all, a piece of news. I have just heard that my brother is going to marry Mrs. John Jacks."
Piers was mute with astonishment. It was so long since he had seen Mrs. Jacks, and he pictured her as a woman much older than Eustace Derwent. His clearest recollection of her was that remark she made at the luncheon-table about the Irish, that they were so "sentimental"; it had blurred her beauty and her youth in his remembrance.
"Yes, Eustace is going to marry her; and I shouldn't wonder if the marriage turns out well. It leads to the disagreeable thing I have to talk about. You know that I engaged myself to Arnold Jacks. I did so freely, thinking I did right. When the time of the marriage drew near, I had learnt that I had done _wrong_. Not that I wished to be the wife of anyone else. I loved nobody; I did not love the man I was pretending to. As soon as I knew that--what was I to do? To marry him
