THE PITY OF IT ALL.
Although it was nearly two weeks since Sinclair had written to her, she
had not seen him once. He had talked the matter over with Tom and Mrs.
Davis, and they had decided that, for a time at least, it would be best
for her not to see him. About a week before the Ballards sailed, Cleo
wrote to Sinclair. She made no allusion whatever to his letter to her.
She simply asked him to come and see her before she left Japan, and
without a moment's hesitation Sinclair went straight to her. He could
afford to be generous now that his own happiness was assured.
It was a strange meeting. The man was at first constrained and ill at
ease. On the other hand, the girl met him in a perfectly emotionless,
calm fashion. She gave him her hand steadily, and her voice did not
falter in the slightest.
"I want you to know the truth," she said, "before I go away."
"Don't let us talk about it, Cleo," Sinclair said. "It will only cause
you pain."
"That is what I deserve," she said. "That is why I have always been
wrong--I was afraid to look anything painful in the face. I avoided and
shrank from it till--till it broke my heart. It does me good now to
talk--to speak of it all."
He sat down beside Cleo, and looked at her with eyes of compassion.
"You must not pity me," she said, a trifle unsteadily. "I do not deserve
it. I have been a very wicked woman."
"It was not altogether your fault, Cleo," he said, vaguely trying to
comfort, but she contradicted him almost fiercely.
"It _was_--it was, indeed, all my fault." She caught her breath sharply.
"However, that was not what I wanted to speak about. It was this. I
wanted to tell you that--that--after all, I do not love _you_. That I--I
loved _him_--Orito!" She half-breathed the last word.
Sinclair sat back in his chair, and looked at her with slow, studying
eyes.
She repeated wearily: "Yes; I loved him--but I--did not--know--it till
_it was too late_!"
For a long time after that the two sat in complete silence. Sinclair
could not find words to speak to her, and the girl had exhausted her
heart in that heart-breaking and now tragic confession.
Then the man broke the silence with a sharp, almost impatient,
ejaculation, which escaped him unconsciously. "The pity of it all!--Good
God!"
"Arthur, I want to see--to speak to Numè before I go away. You will let
me; will you not?"
He hesitated only a moment, and then: "Yes, dear, anything you want."
And when he was leaving her, she said to him, abruptly, with a sharp
questioning note in her voice that wanted to be denied:
"I am a very wicked woman!"
"No--no; anything but that," he said, and stooping kissed her thin,
frail hand.
Something choked him at the heart and blinded his eyes as he left her,
and all the way back to his office, in the jinrikisha, he kept thinking
of the girl's white, suffering face, and memories of the gay, happy,
careless Cleo he had known in America mingled with it in his thoughts in
a frightful medley. Something like remorse crept into his own heart; for
was he entirely blameless? But he forgot everything painful when he
arrived home, for there was a perfume-scented little note written on
thin rice-paper, waiting for him, and Numè was expecting him that day.
When one has present happiness, it is not hard to forget the sorrows of
others.