"It is not that; I am afraid of myself, I think," she said with a sigh, and she looked down at his boots.
His face lighted up.
"Then—" he began eagerly; but she put up her hand with a gesture of warning.
"No, no, you mistake me; I do not believe that it is in me to love anybody—for long. My friends say it is because I have never known a mother's love; but if my parents had lived they would simply have made me fight with them through their tiresome affection for me. Now, I know what you are going to say—that I am speaking with the spirit of the age, or some of that twaddle I have heard before. If I am, it is you who have taught it me, for I don't allow anybody else to mention the age to me; I am sick of it and the people who make their living out of abusing it. I could never love you, or anybody. That's the truth, and—don't you believe me?"
"Not quite," he said, and looked at her in an unpleasantly direct way.
"Besides," she said, rather awkwardly, catching at another loophole of escape, "there is this Norah Bisley: how am I to know that she will not come back?"
He shook his head, and she smiled at the guilelessness of his reply.
"I don't think it is possible. You see, I wrote three times—"
"The letters may have gone astray."
"The third one I sent by hand, and it was returned to me unopened. I can see now that it is only what I might have expected; she did not have a thought apart from her father, and her father never liked me well enough to look on me in the light of a son-in-law. He took her away directly he suspected our liking for one another, and when they got together and away from me he must have persuaded her to give me up. I wrote to him and I wrote to her, but, as you know, with no avail. She was a lovable little thing, spoiled by her weakness of will, poor little Norah!"