“I know,” she replied, looking up, “because I know a lot of things in a way. But,” she added after a pause, “you may have mine if you like.”
“But,” I went on, “they would scarcely love me as they love you, and might not want to have such an increase in their family.”
“They would love you,” she asserted, taking my hand in hers, “just as much as they love me. And I should be your sister, and you would have no end of friends.”
“Do friends mean happiness?”
“Yes, they mean more love.”
“Not more expense?”
“I never heard the word before, not in connection with a friend,” and thus our conversation ended.
CHAPTER III
Virginius soon returned, and with him his wife, whose name I learned soon afterwards was Ursula.
But where had gone that coldness, that almost taciturn manner, and the sternness that had seemed to me his most especial characteristics when on earth? Even that silence, which once in a fit of anger I had termed contemptible, had vanished. Far away from earth and all its unreal glamour and the false shade thrown on the Power of Goodness, he was a different spirit.