Indeed, she could not understand it. She judged from her own feelings; to love and to be loved was, to her imagination, the highest condition of happiness. Earth contained no brighter lot; and if in the Heaven and future life we believe in and look forward to--all of us, I hope--some such bliss as the bliss of pure love is to be ours, there can be no better reward for living a good life.
"You asked me to tell you my troubles," said Alfred, a little sulkily, "and I told you: money. But you seem to have forgotten it already."
"I did, for a moment, my dear," she replied remorsefully; "I forgot it in my delight at the news you have told me for and in the contemplation of your happiness."
"How can I be happy," he grumbled, "with such a trouble upon me? You do not know what it is, and how it weighs me down. How can I show my face to Lizzie when I am so pressed, and when I am in debt, and can't pay?"
"And yet," she said, out of her own goodness and unselfishness, "you have brought me here for a holiday to-day, and I have been thoughtless enough to come, and put you to expense, when I ought to have guessed you could not afford it!"
The very construction she placed upon it displayed him in a generous light which he so little deserved, that he felt inwardly ashamed of himself.
"How could you have guessed? I have kept my troubles to myself. Why should I bother you with them? And it would be hard, indeed, if I could not give you a little pleasure now and then. It isn't much I give you, Lil--not as much as I should like to. Until I saw Lizzie, I had no one to love but you, and now, when everything might be so splendid with me, here am I stumped because I am hard-up. It's too bad--that's what it is--it's too bad altogether; and just at the time that I have got the tip for the Cesarewitch, and could make a thousand pounds as safe as nails."
All this was Greek to Lily. She did not know what the "tip" or the Cesarewitch was, but she was too anxiously interested in Alfred's main trouble to go into details.
"Is it much money you want, Alfred?"
"No, not much, Lily."