I hate
to snub Marigold, excellent and devoted fellow, so I let him talk;
but my mind was occupied with worrying problems.
CHAPTER VI
Leonard Boyce had received me on sufferance. I had come upon him
while he was imprudently exposing himself to view. There had been
no way out of it. But he made it clear that he desired no other
Wellingsfordian to invade his privacy. Secretly he had come to see
his mother and secretly he intended to go. I remembered that
before he went to the front he had not come home, but his mother
had met him in London. He had asked me for no local news. He had
inquired after the welfare of none of his old friends. Never an
allusion to poor Oswald Fenimore's gallant death--he used to run
in and out of Wellings Park as if it were his own house. What had
he against the place which for so many years had been his home?
With regard to Betty Fairfax, he had loved and ridden away, it is
true, leaving her disconsolate. But though everyone knew of the
engagement, no one had suspected the defection. Betty was a young
woman who could keep her own counsel and baffle any curiosity-
monger or purveyor of gossip in the country.
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