“Well,” I said stumblingly, as she stood before me. “You heard what he said, Miss Nolan?”
I was not sympathetic. I knew it. Perhaps, having once asserted myself, I might have grown so. But she would not give me the opportunity. In the meantime, I did not feel the less the full force of this mismatch.
She put her hand in a lost way to her forehead.
“I will try,” she said, in a low voice, “because he asked me. There—there was a great trouble—O! it was so far back. I can’t remember it—and then everything went.”
“He is willing, it appears, to take that interval, that trouble, on trust,” I said. “He only asks you, it seems, to repay his confidence. What you are is what he desires. Cannot you consider yourself new-born into his love?” (I positively sneered the word to myself.)
“There is something stands between us,” she only murmured helplessly.
“He doesn’t admit it for himself,” I insisted irritably. “It might be the ruin of his career, of his position, as foreseen by his friends. I suppose he wishes to assure you that that counts for nothing with him, if by any chance the bar between you lies in your dim consciousness of such a sentiment.”
I had been brutal, I admit it. I can only palliate my behaviour by confessing that it was intended to sound the first note of my moral surrender to the appeal of those poor, pain-troubled eyes. Now, at least, I had got my shaft home. She looked up at me with a light of amazed knowledge in her face.
“Thank you,” she said. “I knew there was a right reason; and all the time I have been hunting for a fancied one.”
I suffered an instant reaction to dismay. I had had no right whatever to make this point. Whatever my private opinion of Valentine’s folly, I had allowed myself to be accredited his ambassador.