“Yes—oh yes, I hope so! Good night.”
CHAPTER VI.
THE HAND AT THE GATE.
“Which do you pity the most of us three?”
Most girls at three and twenty believe that they have explored their own characters, and know pretty accurately their emotional capabilities. They have always been taking soundings in their souls, noting eagerly any signs of increasing depth or of shoaling water; the most trivial incidents have a local importance and imagined connection. In fact, the phrase, “Falling in love,” implies, in their case, a contradiction of terms, the various phases of the disorder being accepted by its victims with scientific recognition.
I think I must have been very deficient in this power of self-analysis. I had always taken my life as it came, without much introspective thought of its effect upon me, and on the one or two occasions when I had been confronted with the necessity for knowing my own mind, I had never found the need for searchings of heart to discover if the germs of any unsuspected feeling were hidden there. I had taken for granted that I must be a hard-headed, hard-hearted person, somewhat probably of Aunt Jane’s type. I used to listen with an amused sympathy to the intricacies of sentimental detail with which many of my friends recounted their experiences, and had often offered, not without a certain sense of superiority, the cold-blooded counsels of common sense.
It was to me the remotest of chances that I should ever be driven to weigh, as they did, the value of a sentence, a word, or a look; and yet, nevertheless, now, not three months after I had left America, this was precisely what I found myself doing.
I awoke, the morning after Nugent’s visit, with an unfamiliar feeling of still gladness. I knew that some strange and delightful thing had befallen me; but I waited in dreamy security, till this new happiness that was waiting for me in my waking life should stir me to a clearer knowledge of itself. Slowly it all came back to me. In imagination I lived again through what had happened yesterday afternoon. The unacknowledged anxiety lest he should not come; the relief of hearing that he was not leaving the country; the incredulous uncertainty as to his meaning; and then—ah yes! I put my hand over my eyes, dizzy even at the remembrance of the swift conviction which had taken me with such sovereign power—then, the certainty that he loved me.
How had it all come about? How was it that, before I well understood what was happening, my independence had been overthrown? Looking back over the time I had known him, I could find no reasonable explanation. Until the night of the Jackson-Crolys’ dance I had never admitted to myself that I did more than like his society, and till then I had had still less idea that he did more than care for mine.