“I’m the poorest of mind-readers,” he protested. “I can’t even read my own, at times. But I suppose you have my letter, and you thought it ought to be answered in person.”
“I have had many letters from you: which one do you mean?”
“The one I wrote a week ago to-day in the hotel in Chattanooga.”
She shook her head slowly. “No; your last letter was written two weeks ago, and it was postmarked ‘Coalville.’ I remember you said you were writing after Poictiers had gone to bed.”
Tregarvon groaned inwardly. The thing which he thought had been safely done had not been done at all; it still remained to be done. He was bracing himself to take the plunge when she went on hurriedly:
“You were saying just now that you couldn’t read your own mind—sometimes. I wish I might read it now—this moment, Cousin Vance!” She was trying to look him fairly in the eyes and was not succeeding very well.
“Read my mind?—heaven forbid!” he gasped. Then he came to his senses and tried to repair the terrible misstep. “You know—er—you know what I mean; a man’s mind is seldom fit for a—a good woman to look into, Elizabeth.”
“Yours is, always,” she asserted loyally, and he winced as if she had struck him a blow. “I assure you I haven’t known you all my life for nothing, Vance. And it was because I had known you as no other woman ever will, that I was willing to try to make you happy.”
He was wondering dumbly how much of this he could stand when she continued, quite calmly, though the brown eyes were looking past him.
“As I have said, I had to come: there is a crisis; and with your letters before me, I couldn’t write. We agreed once, you remember, to go around the sentimental field instead of going through it; but—but you haven’t been living up to the spirit of that agreement in your letters.”