For, as drowning men are said to recollect the unrecallable, I had vividly seen in that instant the two months' action just overpast, and its three participants,--the thin-lipped mother, the besotted millionaire, and the girl shakily hesitant between ideals and the habits of a life-time.
"But I might have known the mother would win," I reflected: "Why, didn't Bettie say she would?"
I refolded the letter I had just read, to keep it as a salutary relic; and then:
"Dear Avis!" said I; "now heaven bless your common-sense! and I don't especially mind if heaven blesses your horrific painted hag of a mother, also, if they've a divine favor or two to spare."
And I saw there was a letter from Peter Blagden, too. It said, in part:
I am everything that you think me, Bob. My one defence is that I could not help it. I loved her from the moment I saw her ... You did not appreciate her, you know. You take, if you will forgive my saying it, too light a view of life to value the love of a good woman properly, and Avis noticed it of course. Now I do understand what the unselfish love of woman means, because my first wife was an angel, as you know ... It is a comfort to think that my dear saint in heaven knows I am not quite so lonely now, and is gladdened by that knowledge. I know she would have wished it--
I read no further. "Oh, Stella! they have all forgotten. They all insist to-day that you were an angel, and they have come almost to believe that you habitually flew about the world in a night-gown, with an Easter lily in your hand--But I remember, dear. I know you'd scratch her eyes out. I know you'd do it now, if only you were able, because you loved this Peter Blagden."
Thereafter I must have wasted a full quarter of an hour in recalling all sorts of bygone unimportant happenings, and I was not bothering one way or the other about Avis ...
In the moonlighted garden I found Bettie. But with her was Josiah Clarriker, Fairhaven's leading business-man. He shook hands, and whatever delight he may have felt at seeing me was admirably controlled.
"Now don't let me interfere with your eloquence," I urged, "but go right on with the declamation."
"I make no pretension to eloquence, Mr. Townsend. I was merely recalling to Miss Hamlyn's attention the beautiful lines of our immortal poet, Owen Meredith, which run, as I remember them: