"Oh, no. He would never have let her send him away; and Aunt Elizabeth says, solemnly, that he never came."
"You told her about him then?" asked Mrs. Reade.
"Beatrice, I was nearly mad—I don't know what I said. She was very angry—she always hated him. But I did not care—I was too miserable to care. And I made her swear that he had never come; and now—it is nearly February—now I know he didn't. I don't want anybody to tell me."
Mrs. Reade put all these revelations into her mental crucible, and in a few seconds she had the product ready. On presenting it to Rachel, wrapped up in the gentlest language, it came to this simply—that "it was always the way with men of that kind."
"He is not like other men," said Rachel. "I do not blame him. I have thought of it, over and over and over, every night and every day, and I know why it was. I ran after him, Beatrice—I took him before he offered himself to me—I had only seen him once or twice when I showed him I loved him, and made him think I wanted him—he did not ask me to be his wife until I had given myself to him already! I did not think of it then, but I see it clearly now. I dragged him into it—I gave him no choice. And now he is away, and he thinks about it, and he knows I am not enough for him. How should I be enough—I for such a man as that? Oh, that happy woman, who died in his arms! Oh, how I wish I had been she!"
"Well," said Mrs. Reade, after a pause, trying to speak cheerfully, but feeling profoundly disheartened; "you ought not to have had anything to do with lovers and marriages at your time of life, and you must just give up thinking of such things until you are older and wiser."
"I shall never give him up," said Rachel quietly; "never, if I live to be a hundred. I have told Aunt Elizabeth—I told her to tell Mr. Kingston—that I shall never love any other man. It would be impossible, after loving him. When I am well I shall ask her to let me go out and be a governess, and earn my own living. I don't want to be rich, I want to be poor, like him. And some day, perhaps, I may see him again, and be able to do something for him—if it isn't till he is an old, old man, I don't care. If only God lets him live and lets me live, so that we are both in the world together—I'll take my chance of the rest. But—but," and she turned her head from side to side, and began to tremble and cry in a weak, hysterical abandonment of all self-command, "if I have to wait for years and years, without a sight of his face or a sound of his voice, how shall I be able to live? The longing for him will kill me!"
Mrs. Reade went away when her carriage returned, more humble-minded than she had been in her life. She wanted very much to stay and nurse her cousin until she was better, but she could not do that, because she could not trust Ned to keep house and keep sober by himself; so she set off to see the doctor to get a confidential report of the "case," meaning to intimate her suspicions that there was a touch of fever on the brain, and to gain his sanction to a scheme for removing the invalid to her own cheerful abode at South Yarra as soon as she became moderately convalescent.
