“Pah—you thought you were too good to be rejected.”
He was very pale, and when he was pale, the tan on his skin looked sickly. He regarded me with his dark eyes, which were now full of misery and a child’s big despair.
“And nothing else,” I completed, with which the little, exhausted gunboat of my anger wrecked and sank utterly. Yet no thoughts would spread sail on the sea of my pity: I was like water that heaves with yearning, and is still.
Leslie was very ill for some time. He had a slight brain fever, and was delirious, insisting that Lettie was leaving him. She stayed most of her days at Highclose.
One day in June he lay resting on a deck chair in the shade of the cedar, and she was sitting by him. It was a yellow, sultry day, when all the atmosphere seemed inert, and all things were languid.
“Don’t you think, dear,” she said, “it would be better for us not to marry?”
He lifted his head nervously from the cushions; his face was emblazoned with a livid red bar on a field of white, and he looked worn, wistful.
“Do you mean not yet?” he asked.
“Yes—and, perhaps,—perhaps never.”
“Ha,” he laughed, sinking down again. “I must be getting like myself again, if you begin to tease me.”