Page:The little blue devil (IA littlebluedevil00mackiala).pdf/219

keeping her away too, for she could not go back until he was firmly established there, and she did not think she liked America very much.

“No one belongs to me here,” she thought, “and in England they are all cross with me. I can't go back till they have got over that, and are only—sorry. Tony is sorry. But Trent Stoke is really his. Oh, dear! I wonder whether life makes everyone unhappy!”

When he went to bed that night Tony lay awake thinking hard. He felt rather as he had when he was a little boy inventing ways to make a fortune.

“I’m damned if I can see what to do,” he thought. “I’m free to refuse the thing—but then she’s free not to take it. And she won’t. . . . It’s not much use trying to prove that I’m not the man, I’d be sure to forget some important link, and they’d find me out. . . . Poor little girl! She’s utterly unfit to be getting her own living, and that’s all my fault. She looks five years older than she did (it’s true she only looked a tall fifteen!), and her face has twice as much in it as it used to have. It was such a little pink satin mask before—when it wasn’t icily null, like the lamented Maud’s. . . . She’s much more interesting now—but to think I drove her out! What sort of a time has she been having? . . . I can guess a little. All sorts of pins and swords and burrs mixed together, sticking in at the same time. People aren’t so anxious to talk to her as they used to be. Poor little Lady Trent! . . . If I could only think of a way. . . . It must hurt when the deference stops. I’ve never had it, but . . . She’s a pathetic child, I’d be glad she was my cousin if it wasn’t so infernally awkward. . . . I wish I’d died before {{nowrap|saying———

“Brilliant idea! Why not die?—officially. It’s been done before, and it’d be easier for me than for most men, since I have no family and no friends to speak of. In some