“Sir Arthur Lyle and his family are all coming back in a few days, I hear.”
“So they may; it matters little to me, Dolly. Shall I tell you a secret? Take my arm, Dolly,—the path is rough here,—you may as well lean on me. We are not likely to have many more walks together. Oh dear! if you were as sorry as I am, what a sad stroll this would be!”
“What's your secret, Tony?” asked she, in a faint voice
“Ah! my secret, my secret,” said he, ponderingly: “I don't know why I called it a secret,—but here is what I meant. You remember, Dolly, how I used to live up there at the Abbey formerly. It was just like my home. I ordered all the people about just as if they had been my own servants,—and, indeed, they minded my orders more than their master's. The habit grew so strong upon me, of being obeyed and followed, that I suppose I must have forgot my own real condition. I take it I must have lost sight of who and what I actually was, till one of the sons—a young fellow in the service in India—came back and contrived to let me make the discovery, that, though I never knew it, I was really living the life of a dependant. I 'll not tell you how this stung me, but it did sting me—all the more that I believed, I fancied, myself—don't laugh at me—but I really imagined I was in love with one of the girls—Alice. She was Alice Trafford then.”
“I had heard of that,” said Dolly, in a faint voice.
“Well, she too undeceived me—not exactly as unfeelingly nor as offensively as her brother, but just as explicitly—you know what I mean?”
“No; tell me more clearly,” said she, eagerly.
“I don't know how to tell you. It's a long story,—that is to say, I was a long while under a delusion, and she was a long while indulging it. Fine ladies, I 'm told, do this sort of thing when they take a caprice into their heads to civilize young barbarians of my stamp.”
“That's not the generous way to look at it, Tony.”
“I don't want to be generous,—the adage says one ought to begin by being just. Skeffy—you know whom I mean, Skeff Darner—saw it clearly enough—he warned me about it. And what a clever fellow he is! Would you believe it, Dolly? he actually knew all the time that I was not really in love when I thought I was. He knew that it was a something made up of romance and ambition and boyish vanity, and that my heart, my real heart, was never in it.”