“You’re naught but a shallow coquette,” said Archie, blurting out his grievance.
“Have you any claim upon me, Archie M’Clean? Did I not tell you that I could not care for you as you chose I should? Have you any right to call me to account?”
He confessed he had not, but she had encouraged him to believe she did care for him in times past, and he had told her he would not give her up.
“I know you said that, but I have never deceived you, and I said I would marry you. I said that when I was but a slip of a girl; but even then I told you it would be only in case I did not see some one I liked better, and you were free to do likewise.”
Archie’s face fell. “Ay, then, if ye have seen some one, it’s all over, and I’d as well take my way to Canonsburg as soon as I can, but it will be fey with me when I think o’ ye an’ that light-headed Ritchie, though I don’t want to part in anger, Agnes. We’re friends?”
“Oh, yes, friends.” She wondered suddenly if, after all, she could let Archie go. If she should never see Parker again, if it was as Carter had told her, that he would marry Alicia, what of herself? “I’d no like to be an old maid,” she told that same self honestly, “and, after all, who better than Archie?” As a minister’s wife she could give herself up to doing good, and that would be a wise and consistent thing to do. She might not be as happy as she had hoped, but she could make others happy. She looked up wistfully. “Is it of young Carter Ritchie you’re thinking?” she asked, twisting the ends of her handkerchief abstractedly.
“Who else could it be? He is with ye morn, noon, and night.”
“It is not he more than yourself, Archie. We are friends as you and I are, and he is content that way; we are nothing but comrades.” She did not confess that half the charm of Carter’s society lay in the fact that she liked to hear him talk of his Virginia home and of his cousins.
Archie’s face brightened. “Then ye’ll keep the same way o’ thinking and ye’re no changed?”
“I’m not changed this last month if that’s what you mean. I feel the same toward you, Archie, but if you are going to bring me to task every time I go walking with another, I can’t answer for consequences.”