“This is a revelation!” he exclaimed. “I thought you and your mother were devoted to them both.”
“It would be like me, would it not?” Mamie emphasised her words with an angry little laugh.
“It is not like you to hate people so savagely,” George observed, looking at her closely.
“I should always hate anybody who hurt you—and I can hate, with all my heart!”
“Are you so fond of me as that?”
George thought that the girl was becoming every moment harder to understand. It had seemed a very natural question, since they had known each other and loved each other like brother and sister for so long. But he saw that there was something the matter. There was a frightened look in Mamie’s grey eyes which he had never seen before, as though she had come all at once upon a great and unexpected danger. Then all the outline of her face softened wonderfully with a strange and gentle expression under the young man’s gaze. She had never been pretty, save for her eyes and her alabaster skin. For one moment, now, she was beautiful.
“Yes,” she said in an uncertain voice, “I am very fond of you—more fond of you than you will ever know.”
Her secret was out, though she did not realise it. Then for the first time in George’s life, though he was nearly thirty years of age, he looked on the face of a woman who loved him with all her heart, and he knew what love meant in another, as he had known it in himself.
The sun was going down behind the western hills and the dark water was very smooth and placid as he dipped his sculls noiselessly into the surface. He rowed evenly on for some minutes without speaking. Mamie was looking into the stream and drawing her white, ungloved hand along the glassy mirror.
“Thank you, Mamie,” he said at last, very gently and kindly.