During this speech she had withdrawn her hand, but at the close she offered it to him again.
Paul Derinzy, however, drew himself up; for an instant he seemed as though about to speak to her, but it was evident he doubted his power of self-command, his eyes filled with tears, and his under-lip trembled visibly. Then with a strong effort he recovered himself, took off his hat, and making a formal bow, hurried away.
"It would never have done," said Daisy, looking after him. Then, as she started on her homeward walk, she said, "It would have been neither one thing nor the other; a kind of genteel poverty. Unrecognised by his relations, he would soon have sickened of that kind of life, and I should have been left to my own devices, to mope and pine at home or amuse myself abroad; in either case, a very undesirable mode of life. My vanity Paul talked about, that could not live without another admirer! Poor fellow, he wasn't right there. It wasn't vanity; it was a craving for luxury and position that first led me to listen to this man. I have to give him my answer by the end of the week. I don't think there is much doubt as to what it will be."
A loud cry interrupted her thoughts just at this moment, and looking up, she saw a carriage, drawn by a pair of splendid horses, turning into the street that she was about to cross. The coachman and footman sitting on the box called out to warn her of her danger, and as she sprang back, they looked at her and laughed insolently. A woman, handsome and young, and splendidly dressed in sables, lay back in the barouche, and looked at the girl, who was covered with a mud-shower whirling from the wheels, with a glance half of pity, half of contempt.
Daisy's face was ablaze in an instant.
"I have been a poverty-stricken drudge long enough," she said. "Now I will ride in my own carriage, and stop all chance of insults such as these."
[CHAPTER XXIV.]
GEORGE'S DETERMINATION.
Paul Derinzy's was not the only perturbed spirit in the Principal Registrar's room of the Stannaries Office. To his own extreme astonishment, George Wainwright found that his equable spirits and calm philosophic temperament had entirely deserted him, and that he had become silent, moody, and, he was afraid, sometimes irritable. He knew perfectly the cause of this change, and did not attempt to disguise it from himself. He knew that he was suffering from that malady which sooner or later attacks us all, and which, like many other maladies, is more safely got over and disposed of when it comes upon us in youth. That period had passed with George Wainwright. He shook his head rather grimly as he surveyed in the glass the brown crisp hair, already beginning to be sprinkled with gray, and the lines round the mouth and eyes, which seemed to have increased at such a confoundedly quick rate lately; and he did not attempt to fight with the malady. He seemed to confess that he could make no head against it, and that his best plan was to succumb to its force, and let it do with him as it would.
"It has come to me somewhat late in life, and I suppose it is the worse on that account," said honest old George to himself; "but I see plainly there is no use in attempting to resist it, and that mine may be looked upon as a settled case. Strange, too, how it has all come about that my going down into Devonshire to rescue Paul from a scrape should have been the cause of my falling into one myself, and into a far more helpless one than that out of which he wanted my help. He has, at all events, the resources of hope. Time may soften the parental anger; and even if it does not, he can afford to set it at defiance, so far as Annette is concerned; while as for Daisy, as he calls her, if he chooses to ignore conventionality, and what the world will think, and Mrs. Grundy will say--and it doesn't seem to me to be a very hard task to do that, though harder perhaps for a dashing young fellow like him than a middle-aged hermit like myself--he may marry the girl, and, like the people in the story-books, live happy ever after. But my look-out is very different. I have examined mine own heart. God knows, with as much strict search as I could bring to bear upon it, and I feel that, so far as Annette is concerned, I am irretrievably---- And I never thought I could love anyone at all in this kind of way. I am perfectly certain that I shall never love anyone else; and therein lies the utter hopelessness of the case. I buoy myself up with the belief that this darling child is, I may almost say, attached to me--that she feels for me what in another person would be affection and attachment. She says that I understand her better than anyone else; and that she is happier in my society than in that of any other person. What more could the wisest among us say to show their preference? And yet the hopelessness, the utter hopelessness! That conversation with my father has left no doubt on my mind that he, at all events, regards her malady as incurable; and though the fact of my comprehending her so thoroughly might possibly have some good effect upon her disease, and at all events would tend to mitigate and soften her affliction, any thought of marriage with her would be impossible. Even I myself, who am regarded, I know, by these lads at the office as a kind of social iconoclast, stand aghast at the idea, and at once acknowledge my terror of Mrs. Grundy's remark. And yet it seems so hard to give her up. My life, which was such a happy one, in its quiet, and what might almost be called its solitude, seems to attend me no more. I am restless and uneasy; I find no solace in my books or my work, and have even neglected poor maman, so occupied are my thoughts with this one subject. I cannot shake it off, I cannot rid myself of its influence. It is ever present on my mind, and unless something happens to effect a radical change in my state, I shall knock myself up and be ill. I feel that coming upon me to a certainty. A good sharp travel is the only thing which would be of any use: the remedy experienced by the man of whom my father is so fond of talking--who found relief from the utter prostration and misery which he underwent at the death of his only son by the intense study of mathematics--would not help me one atom. I cannot apply my mind--or what I call my mind--to anything just now. The figure of this girl comes between me and the paper; her voice is always ringing in my ears; her constrained eager regard, gradually melting into quiet confidence, is ever before me: and, in fact, I begin to feel myself a thorough specimen of an old fool hopelessly in love."