"What to do?"
"Yes."
"Well?"
"Give up loving the white angel. Perhaps it isn't there. Perhaps it
doesn't exist. And if it does--perhaps it's a poor, feeble thing that's
no good to me, no good to me."
Suddenly she put her arms on the back of the couch, leaned her face on
them and began to cry gently.
Robin was terribly startled. He got up, stretched out his hands to her in
an impulsive gesture, then drew them back, turned and went to the window.
She was crying for Fritz.
That was absurd and horrible. Yet he knew that those tears came from the
heart of the hidden woman he had so long believed in, proved her
existence, showed that she could love.
CHAPTER XII
AS Lady Holme had foreseen, the impertinent mimicry of Miss Schley
concentrated a great deal of attention upon the woman mimicked. Many
people, accepting the American's cleverness as a fashionable fact, also
accepted her imitation as the imitation of a fact more surreptitious, and
credited Lady Holme with a secret leading towards the improper never
before suspected by them. They remembered the break between the Holmes
and Carey, the strange scene at the Arkell House ball, and began to
whisper many things of Lady Holme, and to turn a tide of pity and of
sympathy upon her husband. On this tide Lord Holme and the American might
be said to float merrily like corks, unabashed in the eye of the sun.
Their intimacy was condoned on all sides as a natural result of Lady
Holme's conduct.
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