“A friendship! Were you her lover?”
“What does it matter? Suffice it to say that she was my dearest friend, and now I have lost her. She has been taken from me,” he said, throwing his arms into the air. It was a superb gesture of despair, and Harding could not help smiling.
“So Evelyn has left him. I wonder for whom?” Then, with as much sympathy as he could call into his voice, he asked if the lady had given any reason for this sudden dismissal.
“Only that she thinks it wrong; we’ve been discussing it all the afternoon. It has made me quite ill;” and he dropped into a chair.
Harding knew perfectly well of whom they were speaking, and Owen knew that he knew, but it seemed more decorous to refrain from mentioning names, and Evelyn’s soul was discussed as if it were an abstract quantity,
