'I—I?' he said, with a blush. 'I was wondering why you gave up this—how you could give up this!'
'Did you wonder?' she said softly, and her eyes, he saw, were very sweet and tender. He thought she lingered on the 'you,' and he looked at her with a strange trouble in his eyes.
'Yes,' he said with a sigh, 'I don't think many women would have—have given this up lightly. You must have had a reason?'
'Yes,' she said in her low voice, with a quiver in it, and that droop of her pretty mouth that he remembered so well; 'I had a reason.'
Something in her manner more than in her voice struck him, and the trouble in his eyes deepened.
'May I know—will you tell me the reason, Lucy?' he said hoarsely.
'I could tell anyone but you,' she said passionately, and then she turned away her face from him, but not before he had seen that her eyes were full of tears.
Then a strange light came suddenly into his eyes as he looked at her as she sat there in her soft white clinging gown, with her bosom heaving, and the rich colour sweeping over her neck and face.
'You do not mean——Oh, Lucy!' he said, and his voice shook, and the trouble in his eyes gave place to the light of a sudden wild hope.