"I am very glad you have asked me, my dear," replied her father. "I did not like to talk of Miles to you until you should mention him first. I have heard from him lately, and I don't like the tone in which he writes about himself."
"Is he ill?" said Gertrude, with quick alarm in her face and in her voice.
"No, not at all; but he is thoroughly discontented and unhappy. He has tried his very best and hardest to live the life of a moral English squire at Rowley, but he cannot do it; he has no heart for it; and I should not be surprised any day to hear that he had given up the useless attempt. He has not forgotten you, Gertrude; and he cannot forget you."
"I am glad of that," she said in the same calm tone. "I suppose I ought to say otherwise; but it would not be true, and I cannot say it. I deceived him, and was forced to disappoint him, and bring a great cross on his life; but I cannotsay that I should be glad to know he had forgotten me, and had found elsewhere the happiness he thought he might have had with me."
"I am glad you speak so frankly to me," said Lord Sandilands, laying his hand tenderly on the shining bands of Gertrude's dark-brown hair. "I have been thinking a great deal about you and Miles Challoner; and I should like to know exactly how you feel about him."
The answer was very plainly to be read in her face, but Gertrude did not hesitate to give it in words.
"There is no change in my feelings for him, father," she said. "I shall never cease to love him."
"Would you marry him, Gertrude, if he came to ask you, though your marriage should involve your relinquishing all connexion with England, breaking entirely, even more completely than we have done, with old associations, and making quite a new life in a new country for yourselves? Don't start, my dear, and look so agitated; he has not told me to ask you this. You are not required to give a decision. I have asked you for my own satisfaction, because I want to know."
"I would marry him," Gertrude answered, "to go to the other end of the world with him, if it did not mean parting with you--but that can never be--without a scruple, without a regret, without a fear. But he could not marry me--have I not deceived him?--even supposing he cared for me now as he once did. No, no, that is over and I must not repine, blest as my life is far above my deserts."
She put her father's hand to her lips as she spoke, then laid her soft cheek tenderly upon it.