“I am not English,” she replied. “I wish I were; I should not then be so quick to feel, so sensitive, so keen of anguish. My mother was a Spanish lady; my first few happiest years were spent in Spain.”
“I thought so,” said Mr. Eyrle, and then she looked frankly at him.
“I wonder how it is,” she said, “that I seem too ready to place such confidence in you; there must be a mystery about it. I say so little to others.”
“You see no one else,” he replied, touched and flattered by the trust she had in him.
“Even when I did, I had not that instinctive faith in them that seems to spring naturally to you. One of my old theories used to be that soul recognized soul, even as body recognizes body.”
“Why do you call it an old theory?” he asked. “To me, it seems a very feasible one.”
“Because I trusted to it once too often—once the eyes of soul saw falsely.”
“That happens to most of us,” he said, for she had paused abruptly.
“To none, to none so cruelly as to me. You talked to me the other day about a passion flower. Do you know, I might take the passion flower as an emblem of my life? No other expresses it half so well.”
Her dark eyes were filled with indignant tears. She looked a very Niobe as she stood before him with clasped hands and quivering lips.