But despite, or perhaps on account of his complete ineptitude, I had a feeling of sympathy for Turnbull. It must have been very exasperating for him to stand there, roaring out his sincerest convictions and to be received by every one of us with a forbearing contempt.
Even Brenda expressed something of pity for him.
"My dear Ronnie, don't be absolutely idiotic," she said, forbearingly, but rather as though she warned him that he had said quite enough.
He breathed heavily, resentfully, but still declined to look at her. "Of course if you'd sooner I went away altogether..." he remarked.
"I don't see that you can help us by staying," Brenda said.
"I mean for good," he explained tragically.
I heard afterwards that he had been in love with Brenda since she was nine years old, but I might have inferred the fact from his present attitude. He simply could not believe, as yet, that she would let him go--for good, as he said. No doubt she had tricked and plagued him so often in the past that the present situation seemed to him nothing more than the repetition of a familiar experience.
Brenda must have realised that, too; but, no doubt, she shrank from wounding him mortally in public. The ten years of familiar intercourse between her and Ronnie were not to be obliterated in a day, not even by the fury of her passion for Arthur Banks.
"I know," she said. "But you _are_ interrupting, Ronnie. Do go!"
"And leave you here?" He was suddenly encouraged again by her tone. He looked down at her, now; pleading like a great puppy, beseeching her to put a stop to this very painful game.
"Surely, Ronnie, you must realise that I--mean it, this time," she said.
"Not that you're going to ... going to Canada," he begged.
"Yes. Yes. Definitely and absolutely finally yes," she said.
"But, _Brenda_!" The long-drawn appeal of her name showed that the full bitterness of the truth was coming home to him at last.
"I'm sorry," she said, and the sound of it was in some way painfully final.
"It isn't because..." he began, but she anticipated his well-known reasons by saying,--
"It's nothing to do with you or with anything you've done, nothing whatever. I'm sorry, Ronnie, but it's fate--just fate. Do go, now. I'll see you again before--before we go."