Christopher winced; it was when Elisabeth was affectionate that he found his enforced silence most hard to bear. How he could have made her love him if he had tried, he thought; and how could he find the heart to make her love him as long as he and she were alike dependent upon Miss Farringdon's bounty, and they had neither anything of their own? He rejoiced that Alan Tremaine had failed to win her love; but he scorned him as a fool for not having succeeded in doing so when he had the chance. Had Christopher been master of the Moat House he felt he would have managed things differently; for the most modest of men cherish a profound contempt for the man who can not succeed in making a woman love him when he sets about it.
"By Jove!" he said to himself, looking into the gray eyes that were so full of sympathy just then, "what an ass the man was to talk to such a woman as this about art and philosophy and high-falutin' of that sort! If I had only the means to make her happy, I would talk to her about herself and me until she was tired of the subject—and that wouldn't be this side Doomsday. And she thinks that I am cold-hearted!" But what he said to Elisabeth was, "There isn't much the matter with my head—nothing for you to worry about, I can assure you. Let us talk about something more interesting than my unworthy self—Tremaine, for instance."
"I used to believe in Alan," Elisabeth confessed; "but I don't so much now. I wonder if that is because he has left off making love to me, or because I have seen that his ideas are so much in advance of his actions."
"He never did make love to me, so I always had an inkling of the truth that his sentiments were a little over his own head. As a matter of fact, I believe I mentioned this conviction to you more than once; but you invariably treated it with the scorn that it doubtless deserved."
"And yet you were right. It seems to me that you are always right, Chris."
"No—not always; but more often than you are, perhaps," replied Christopher, in rather a husky voice, but with a very kindly smile. "I am older, you see, for one thing; and I have had a harder time of it for another, and some of the idealism has been knocked out of me."
"But the nice thing about you is that though you always know when I am wrong or foolish, you never seem to despise me for it."
Despise her? Christopher laughed at the word; and yet women were supposed to have such keen perceptions.
"I don't care whether you are wise or foolish," he said, "as long as you are you. That is all that matters to me."
"And you really think I am nice?"