“Loved and been disappointed!” repeated the young girl in a very low voice, that hardly reached his ear. She was looking down, carelessly tying and untying the ends of the tiller-ropes.
“Yes. That is it,” he said as though musing on something very long past. “You know now why I do not go there.”
Then he quickened his stroke a little, and there was a sombre light in his dark eyes that Mamie could not see, for she was still looking down. She was glad that she had asked the question, seeing how he had answered it. There was something in his tone which told her that he was not mistaken about himself, and that the past was shut off from the present in his heart by a barrier it would be hard to break down.
“Do you think you can ever love again?” she asked, after a while, looking suddenly into his face.
“No,” he answered, avoiding her eyes. “I shall never love any woman again—in the same way,” he added after a moment’s pause.
When he looked at her, she was very pale. He remembered all at once how she had changed colour and burst into tears some weeks earlier, sitting in that same place before him. Something was passing in her mind which he could not understand. He was very slow to imagine that she loved him. He was so dull of comprehension that he all at once began to fancy she might be more fond of Constance Fearing than he had guessed, that she might be her friend, as Totty was, and that the two had brought him to their country-house in the hope of soothing his anger, reviving his hopes, and bringing him once more into close relations with the young girl who had cast him off. The idea was ingenious in its folly, but his ready wrath rose at it.
“Are you very fond of her, Mamie?” he asked, bending his heavy brows and speaking in a hard metallic voice.
The blood rushed into the girl’s face as she answered, and her grey eyes flashed.
“I? I hate her! I would kill her if I could!”
George was completely confused. His explanation of Mamie’s behaviour had flashed upon him so suddenly that he had believed it the true one without an attempt to reason upon the matter. Now, it was destroyed in an instant by the girl’s angry reply. When one young woman says that she hates another, it is tolerably easy to judge from her tone whether she is in earnest or not. Though he was still sorely puzzled, the cloud disappeared from George’s face as quickly as it had come.