‘I don’t think,’ says Susan, with sweet seriousness, ‘that you ought to speak of her like that. I dare say she was really very fond of you, but if you were both very poor how could you be married?’
‘Is that the view you take of it?’ says Crosby. ‘What a mercenary one! And from a child like you! Susan, I’m ashamed of you!’
‘Oh no, you know what I mean,’ says Susan, blushing divinely whilst making her defence. ‘There might be unkind people behind her, you know, forbidding her to marry you.’
Crosby stops, and his thoughts run swiftly to the mysterious ‘James.’ Were there unkind people behind her when that gallant youth declared his passion?
‘Might there? And if there were, should she listen, do you think?’
‘Ah, some would,’ says Susan, speaking out of the great wealth of worldly lore that can be gathered from eighteen years of life. ‘But others’—thoughtfully—‘wouldn’t.’
‘To which section do you belong?’
‘Oh, me! I don’t know,’ says Susan, growing suddenly very shy. ‘I shouldn’t do anything—I—I should wait.’
‘Would you?’ says Crosby. There is something in the girl’s soft young face, now lowered and turned from him, so full of gentle strength that he wonders at it. Yes, she would wait for her lad—‘Though father, an’ mither, an’ a’ should go mad.’ Is she waiting for James?
‘I’m afraid, after all, I must destroy your illusion,’ says he presently. ‘I don’t think she could have been in love with me. Not overpoweringly, I mean. She had a little money of her own, and I had a little of mine, so that we should not have been altogether paupers. But she was dreadfully addicted to diamonds, and man milliners, and bibelots of all kinds. I have other reasons, too, Susan, for thinking she did not really love me. She never gave me a keepsake! Now you—you have had a keepsake.’