When Anthony was looking down upon the fir-trees, there were two people standing under them, and talking earnestly. One of them was putting out her hand and saying in a voice which was very sad and kind,—
“I believe I am a hundred years older than you, Frank. Do people’s hearts go on getting older and older at this rate, I wonder? I don’t seem to feel as if all that you are saying could be so. Perhaps I am beginning not to feel anything any more.”
“Don’t disbelieve me,” Frank said eagerly. “That is all I ask you, Winifred. Only try to believe how dearly I love you, and trust me, or let me have time to show you.”
She did not turn away from him, she did not even take away her hand which he had clasped, and yet nothing in her attitude or in her eyes seemed to have grown nearer to him during that moment in which they stood so close to each other under the fir-trees, a little hidden from the soft, warm sun. Winifred stood as if she were thinking, but it might have been of something outside herself, and with which she was only concerned as a looker-on. Her face was tenderly grave, but Frank sought in vain for any glow which should answer his. She was silent so long, however, that at last he could bear it no longer, and said in a voice which was all uneven and broken,—
“What do you say, Winifred? You will not refuse me that one little promise?”
She said immediately, looking into his face with unshrinking eyes,—
“Ah, Frank, it is because it is so little that I feel I dare not give it. Dear Frank, what are you offering me?—do you think I do not know its worth?—and for all your heart you ask no more than just a little dead sufferance. You want to give everything, and to have nothing back again.”
“What you call nothing—” began Frank, flushing, but she interrupted him quickly, with a new tone of pain in her voice.
“No, no,—why do we go on talking?—let us try to forget it all, let us try to be dear friends always, but do not ask me to do you a wrong which would make me hate myself.”