“I mean it. I did not mean to tell you yet, yet I never meant not to. Have you guessed, or have I told you? I hardly know. It matters less. But so it is!”
“Jeannie, Jeannie!” cried Miss Fortescue, and the girl was folded in her arms.
For a moment she lay there, her face buried on Miss Fortescue’s shoulder, her hair lying in coils, her arms, warm, supple, clinging, clasped round her neck, and for half a quarter of that embrace jealousy of all the insolent happiness of youth rose bitter in the elder woman’s throat. Here was a young life, one very dear to her, made suddenly complete, and with a pang as overpowering as it was brief, Miss Fortescue raged inwardly over her unfinished, incompleted life. But the next moment all in her that was womanly, all that was true and good rose triumphant. Her outward cynicism, her assumed hardness, fell from her like a peeled bark, and the heart of the tree was sound. But Jeannie had felt the slack return to her eager embrace, and she raised her head.
“You do not understand what it means to me,” she said. “You have never known.”
But Miss Fortescue’s arms closed round her.
“Yes, dear, I have known,” she said, “though that was one of the things you never knew about me. I have known, dear Jeannie——”
Jeannie raised herself to a kneeling position by her chair, and the inimitable unselfishness of love stung her heart.
“I am a little brute,” she said, quietly. “First forgive me, and then we will talk.”
She looked up in the other’s face, and for a moment hardly recognised her. The plain, strong face was no longer there; a dim-eyed girl sat in the chair above her.
“That is no word from me to you, Jeannie,” she said. “It is an insolence to say one forgives those one loves. But I have known.”