There was such an air of conviction, and, it seemed to the simple girl, even of spiritual insight, in his manner that her clear, handsome eyes rested wonderingly on his.
“Do you really think so?” she said thoughtfully. “And yet HE knows that I am like him. Yes,” she continued, answering Randolph's look of surprise, “I am just like HIM in that. I loathe and despise the life that this thing would condemn me to; I hate all that it means, and all that it binds me to, as he used to; and if I could, I would cut and run from it as HE did.”
She spoke with a determined earnestness and warmth, so unlike her usual grave naivete that he was astonished. There was a flush on her cheek and a frank fire in her eye that reminded him strangely of the captain; and yet she had emphasized her words with a little stamp of her narrow foot and a gesture of her hand that was so untrained and girlish that he smiled, and said, with perhaps the least touch of bitterness in his tone, “But you will get over that when you come into the property.”
“I suppose I shall,” she returned, with an odd lapse to her former gravity and submissiveness. “That's what they all tell me.”
“You will be independent and your own mistress,” he added.
“Independent,” she repeated impatiently, “with Dornton Hall and twenty thousand a year! Independent, with every duty marked out for me! Independent, with every one to criticise my smallest actions—every one who would never have given a thought to the orphan who was contented and made her own friends on a hundred a year! Of course you, who are a stranger, don't understand; yet I thought that you”—she hesitated,—“would have thought differently.”
“Why?”
“Why, with your belief that one should make one's own fortune,” she said.
“That would do for a man, and in that I respected Captain Dornton's convictions, as you told them to me. But for a girl, how could she be independent, except with money?”
She shook her head as if unconvinced, but did not reply. They were nearing the garden porch, when she looked up, and said: “And as YOU'RE a man, you will be making your way in the world. Mr. Dingwall said you would.”