“Yes,” confessed Georgie, “you are,” and she gave her a troubled look.
“Then,” returned Lisbeth, “there is all the more reason that I should rusticate. Perhaps, by the spring, I shall be red and fat, like Miss Rosamond Puddifoot,” with a little laugh. “And I shall have taken to tracts, and soup-kitchens, and given up the world, and wear a yellow bonnet, and call London a ‘vortex of sinful pleasure,’ as she does. Why, my dear Georgie, what is the matter?”
The fact was, that a certain incongruity in her beloved Lisbeth’s looks and tone, had so frightened Georgie, and touched her susceptible heart, that the tears had rushed to her eyes, and she was filled with a dolorous pity.
“You are not—you are not happy,” she cried all at once. “You are not, or you would not speak in that queer, satirical way. I wish you would be a little—a little more—kind, Lisbeth.”
Lisbeth’s look was a positively guilty one.
“Kind!” she exclaimed. “Kind, Georgie!”
Having gone so far, Georgie could not easily draw back, and was fain to go on, though she became conscious that she had placed herself in a very trying position.
“It is not kind to keep everything to yourself so closely,” she said, tremulously. “As if we did not care for you, or could not comprehend——”
She stopped, because Lisbeth frightened her again. She became so pale, that it was impossible to say anything more. Her great, dark eyes dilated, as if with a kind of horror, at something.
“You—you think I have a secret,” she interrupted her, with a hollow-sounding laugh. “And you are determined to make a heroine out of me, instead of allowing me to enjoy my ‘nerves’ in peace. You don’t comprehend ‘nerves,’ that is clear. You are running at a red rag, Georgie, my dear. It is astonishing how prone you good, tender-hearted people are to run at red rags, and toss, and worry them.”