"What a simple, innocent little girl you are, Adèle!" said Arthur rather grandly. "You see what I say is quite true—with all your romantic notions you know nothing whatever of the world. I can't very well explain, as you don't seem to understand; but, anyway, what I did was very stupid and wrong, and she showed me that in a moment. Oh, if I could tell you how she looked—so beautiful, so sad!"
The remembrance was overpowering. Arthur hid his burning face in both his hands, and Adèle was silent. To her pure young heart this passion, which an older and more experienced woman would certainly have laughed to scorn, was a sacred thing.
"She forgave me," he continued after a pause. "She said I would soon forget the infatuation."
There was a mournful incredulity in the boy's voice to which the young girl's heart responded. That he could ever forget the infatuation seemed, for the moment, as impossible to one cousin as to the other.
Neither of them spoke for some minutes, then Adèle raised to her cousin a face that was streaming with tears. "I can't help it, Arthur," she said simply, "and please don't think it's for myself. I have everything to make me happy. I was thinking of you and of her. You know they say women's wits are sharper than men's in these matters. I will try and help you in some way, for you must meet her again, dear; but just now everything seems confused. Mamma expects you to dinner, so you had better go home at once and dress. I can easily arrange for a quiet talk in the course of the evening, and then perhaps I shall have thought of some plan, for we must lose no time, as I know she is only staying temporarily in London."
She said it all in a broken way through the tears she could not keep back. He tried to kiss her then, but she slipped out of his arms.
Poor child! The aching at her heart was too great to be borne any longer. She finished her cry in her own room, but what she had said was true—it was not all for herself.
The beautiful lonely stranger and her cousin's passion, which her woman's insight told her was not very hopeful, had their share in causing her sorrow. She could not indulge long, however, in the luxury of tears. She too had to make her dinner-toilet, and that evening her mother was not the only person at the dinner-table who thought she looked even fairer than usual.