CHAPTER XX
THE QUORLEY GRANITE COMPANY
I awoke gloomy enough, and found my lonely breakfast a very cheerless meal. After it I set myself to think out Angel's departure, and my consideration of the matter gave me reason to call myself a fool many times. My blindness now seemed to me incredible. I could only think that my first impressions of Angel as almost a child, wearing her hair in a plait, had crystallized into a fixed idea about her, and that, like all fixed ideas, blinding. I was not so vain as to believe that she was suffering from a serious passion; but it was plain beyond disguising that she had been cherishing a girlish fancy for me. Why else had she shown herself so jealous of Dorothy Delamere? In what else lay the explanation of her fits of brooding and restlessness? In the course of a few weeks' absence the fancy would assuredly fade; but it hurt me a good deal to think that she had been suffering all this while through my stupidity. I could easily have set her mind at rest about that little lump of foolish vanity, Dolly. I could only console myself by the thought that if I had dis-
