“Oh! well, of course I shall have to go back sooner or later,” I replied, as airily as I could. “I do not mean to spend my whole life here.”
“Don’t you?” he said, in a low voice, leaning forward and trying to intercept my eyes, as I looked straight before me into the fire. “I wish you would tell me if you really mean that.”
“I certainly do mean it,” I answered, with decision. “And, after all, I do not see that it much matters whether I do or not.”
“Why do you say it doesn’t matter?” he said slowly.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered idiotically.
“But I think you ought to know before you make assertions of that kind,” he persisted. “I dare say there are several people who would think it mattered a good deal.”
He spoke with an intention in his voice that I had never heard before. My heart gave a startled beat. Did he mean Willy?
“That does not sound at all like what you once said to me. You told me that I was ‘a distinct failure in these parts.’ I should like to know who all these people are who have changed their minds about me,” I said, impelled by a reckless impulse to find out what he had meant.
“Don’t you remember my telling you the other night of one person who had changed his mind? Have you quite forgotten what I said to you then?”
He was very near to me, so near that he must almost have felt my breath as it quickly came and went. My heart was beating fast enough now—hurrying along at such speed that I could not be sure enough of my voice to speak.