“Do not make me think it would have been better for you if I had been,” she said, imploringly. “It was as much the end, and I knew it from the time my recovery stopped short. I would have let you know if I could, and then you would not have been so much shocked.”
“So as to cut me off from you entirely?”
“No, indeed. The thought of seeing you again was too—too overwhelming to be indulged in; knowing, as I did, that if you were the same to me, it must be at this sad cost to you,” and her eyes filled with tears.
“It is you who make it so, Ermine.”
“No; it is the providence that has set me aside from the active work of life. Pray do not go on, Colin, it is only giving us both useless pain. You do not know what it costs me to deny you, and I feel that I must. I know you are only acting on the impulse of generosity. Yes, I will say so, though you think it is to please yourself,” she added, with one of those smiles that nothing could drive far from her lips, and which made it infinitely harder to acquiesce in her denial.
“I will make you think so in time,” he said. “Then I might tell you, you had no right to please yourself,” she answered, still with the same air of playfulness; “you have got a brother, you know—and—yes, I hear you growl; but if he is a poor old broken man out of health, it is the more reason you should not vex him, nor hamper yourself with a helpless commodity.”
“You are not taking the way to make me forget what my brother has done for us.”
“How do you know that he did not save me from being a strong-minded military lady! After all, it was absurd to expect people to look favourably on our liking for one another, and you know they could not be expected to know that there was real stuff in the affair. If there had not been, we should have thought so all the same, you know, and been quite as furious.”
He could not help smiling, recollecting fury that, in the course of these twelve years, he had seen evinced under similar circumstances by persons who had consoled themselves before he had done pitying them. “Still,” he said gravely, “I think there was harshness.”
“So do I, but not so much as I thought at that time, and—oh, surely that is not Rachel Curtis? I told her I thought you would call.”