“Not named! My dear Jack! But stay! I see how it is. My uncle felt that he could trust to my feeling in the matter. He knew that you would not have to look to me in vain.”
Jack turned and looked at him with infinite contempt and unbelief, and then slowly passed out.
CHAPTER XII.
Two days passed since Una had given her promise that should Jack Newcombe come to seek her she would hold no converse with him. How much that promise had cost her no one could say; she herself did not know. She only knew that whereas her life had always seemed dull and purposeless, it had, since Jack Newcombe’s visit, grown utterly dreary and joyless.
Was it love? She did not ask herself the question. Had she done so, she could not have answered it.
Any school-girl of fifteen feeling as Una felt would have known that she was in love, but Una’s only schooling had consisted of the few stern lessons of Gideon Rolfe.
“I can never see him, hear him, speak to him again,” was her one sad reflection; “but if I could be somewhere near him, unseen!”
Then, through her brain, her father’s words rang with melancholy persistence. This youth, whose eyes had seemed so frank and brave, whose voice rang with music so new and sweet, was, so her father said, unutterably wicked. One to be avoided as a dangerous animal! It could not but be true; she thought her father was truth itself.
But if it were so, then how false the world must be, for one to look and speak so gently, and yet be so wicked!