"Oh, bother her heart!" says the younger Miss Beresford, with more candor than decency: "think of his poor heart, if you like, wasting and wearing away because of your unkindness. If I had a lover, that is not how I should treat him. I should do anything in the world he asked me. I should defy everybody in the world for him, and think them well lost. I should run away with him at a moment's notice if he asked me. Now!"
"Oh, Kit!" says Monica, aghast at all this energy.
"I should indeed," nothing daunted; "I shouldn't hesitate. And, at all events, I should be civil to him at all times. Why, the way you treated that wretched young man to-day at Clonbree Barracks was, I consider, shameful! And you call yourself, I dare say, soft-hearted. To look at you, one would think you couldn't be unkind if you tried; and yet the barbarity of your conduct to-day, to a person who literally worships the ground you walk on, was——"
"But what did I do?" interrupts poor Monica, trembling before this whirlwind.
"What didn't you do? you mean. You would not even grant him one kind parting glance. I could have cried for him, he looked so sad and forlorn. I think he looked like suicide,—I do, indeed,—and I shouldn't wonder a bit if in the morning we heard——"
"Oh, Kit, don't! don't!" says Monica, in an agony, as this awful insinuation gains force with her.
"Well, I won't then," says the advocate, pretending to surrender her point by adroitly changing her front. A very Jesuit at soul is this small Kit. "After all, I daresay he will grow tired of your incivility, and so—forget you. Some one else will see how dear a fellow he is, and smile upon him, and then he will give you up."
This picture, being in Monica's eyes even more awful than the former, makes great havoc in her face, rendering her eyes large and sorrowful, and, indeed, so suffused with the heart's water that she seems upon the very verge of tears. She turns these wet but lovely orbs upon her tormentor.
"That would be the best thing he could do for himself," she says, so sadly that Kit insensibly creeps closer to her; "and as for me, it doesn't matter about me, of course."
"Monica, you like him, then," says Kit, suddenly, rising on her knees and looking into her sister's averted eyes. "I am sure of it: I know it now. Why did you not confide in me before?"