She did not say a word. He waited a moment, but none came; and he could not see the tears that were in her eyes. Perhaps he divined that they were there.
"It has been coming on for some time," he said, still in the cheerful tone which he had made himself adopt. "I was nearly certain of it when I was here in January; and since then I have seen some famous oculists, and spent a good deal of time in a dark room—with no very good result. Nothing can be done."
"Nothing? Absolutely nothing?"
"Nothing at all. I must bear it as other men have done. I am rather old to frame my life anew, and I shall never equal Mr. Fawcett in energy and power, though I think I shall take him as my model," said Rupert, with a rather sad smile, "but I must do my best, and I dare say I shall get used to it in time. Kitty, I thought—somehow—that I should like to hear you say that you were sorry.... And you have not said it yet."
"I am sorry," said Kitty, in a low voice.
The tears were falling over her pale cheeks, but she did not turn away her head—why should she? He could not see.
"I have been a fool," said Vivian, with the unusual energy of utterance which struck her as something new in him. "I am thirty-eight—twenty years older than you, Kitty—and I have missed half the happiness that I might have got out of my life, and squandered the other half. I will tell you what happened when I was a lad of one-and-twenty—before you were a year old, Kitty: think of that!—I fell in love with a woman some years older than myself. She was a barmaid. Can you fancy me now in love with a barmaid? I find it hard to imagine, myself. I married her, Kitty. Before we had been married six weeks I discovered that she drank. I was tied to a drunken, brawling, foul-mouthed woman of the lower class—for life. At least I thought it was for life."
He paused, and asked with peculiar gentleness:—
"Am I telling you this at a wrong time? Shall I leave my story for another day? You are thinking of him, perhaps: I am not without thoughts of him, too, even in the story that I tell. Shall I stop, or shall I go on?"
"Go on, please. I want to hear. Yes, as well now as any other time. You married. What then?"