He could not dream long among such conditions. One morning, as he sat beside her at her drawing, she looked up suddenly into his face, and with bewitching naivete remarked—
“This is my birthday—do you know how old I am?”
“No, I never thought.”
“Well, I am seventeen to-day.”
“Seventeen! Great God! is it possible?” And Manton bowed his face, covering it with his hands, and for a long time spoke not a word, though his frame trembled. That magical word, “seventeen,” had revealed every thing to himself. He had as yet always called her by the affectionate baby-name of “Sis.” He had thought of her only as a child; for through these four weary years he had kept no note of time. He supposed, up to this moment, that he had been feeling towards her, too, as towards a child—the same saddened, persecuted child which had first attracted his sympathies by her mournful expression of constant suffering. He had never once thought before that any change had taken place in their relations; he had still fondled her as a spoiled and petted playmate; he still attributed the strange thrills her touch had lately produced in him to a thousand other and innocent causes beside the real. He had not dreamed of passion; he had only learned to dearly love her, as he thought, because she had been developed beneath his hand, and seemed, in some senses, almost a creation of his own—a sort of feminine elaboration of the thought of Frankenstein within him—the creature of his own daring mind and indomitable will. Seventeen! seventeen! Now the whole truth was flooded into his consciousness. She was no longer a child—she was a woman. And he felt that he had indeed loved her as a woman, while recognising her as a gay pet, a plaything. He now understood how deep, how pure, was the unutterable fondness that had grown thus unconsciously into his life, for her, and how monstrous had been the relations into which the mother strove to drag and hold him.
With the first flash of this conviction of his real feeling towards Elna, came the purpose, as stern as it was irrevocable. He lifted his head and turned towards the young girl, with moistened eyelids, and said to her solemnly, and with trembling lips—
“Sis!—Elna, do you know that you are no longer a child? that you are now a woman?”
The blood sprang to her forehead, and, with downcast eyes, she said, in a faint voice—
“I know I’m seventeen to-day.”
“Do you know, too, Elna, that we cannot continue to be to each other that we have been?”