“For some months—ever since I bought Wheal Caroline.”
“And you never betrayed me!”
“We were playfellows, Frederick.” She spoke softly, and turned her face to the other side of the bay-window.
He forgot she was old now—he remembered only the familiar voice and attitude, the same as when in her girlish days she used to sit on the cushioned window-sill and talk with him for hours.
“Playfellows! Was that all, Anne? Only playfellows?”
“Only playfellows,” she repeated firmly. “Never anything more. You knew that always.” And, perhaps unconsciously, Anne looked down on a ring—plain, not unlike a childish keepsake—which she always wore on the wedding-finger of her left hand.
Major Harper sighed, not one of his sentimental sighs, but one from the deeps of his heart. A smile, hollow and sad, followed it. “I suppose it is idle talking now, but—but—you were my first-love, Anne! If things had gone differently, I might have been a different man.”
“Not so. God ordained your fate, not I. No man need be ruined for life because a woman cannot love him. Human beings hang not on one another in that blind way. We have each an individual soul; on another soul may rest all its hopes and joys, but on God only rests its worth, its duties, and its nobility. We may live to do His work, and rejoice therein, long after we have forgotten the very sound of that idle word—happiness.”
She paused.
“Go on; you talk as you always used to do.”