“I have the reasons; I’m obliged to succeed,” was the answer rather gloomily given. Carfax had taken the tonneau party around to the derrick, and the two in the driving-seat of the car had their bit of the mountain-top world momentarily to themselves.
“You say that as if you were sorry,” laughed the music teacher. “Don’t you want to succeed?”
“To want is to desire and need,” he explained meticulously. “Heaven knows, I need success; need it awfully. Yet the very reason for needing it is vicarious on one hand, and an exhibition of the meanest sort of purse-pride on the other. But you know all about that.”
Truly, Miss Richardia did know. It was during his third evening visit to Highmount, while Carfax was trundling the entire school in batches up and down the cherted pike in front of the college grounds in the auto, and Miss Richardia had been playing to him in the otherwise deserted music-room, that Tregarvon had told her all about the family fortunes, and Elizabeth, and his engagement, and the Uncle Byrd millions. He did not regard it as a breach of confidence at the time; of Elizabeth’s confidence or his own. He had merely yielded to an attack of a purely masculine desire to tell all he knew to the nearest woman.
“You still think it is necessary to keep Miss Wardwell waiting?” Miss Richardia was always able to answer his unspoken thought without apparent effort, as he had already learned.
“You wouldn’t have me do anything else, would you?” he retorted discontentedly. “Put yourself in Elizabeth’s place: what would you think of me if I should take advantage of your good-nature, and so give everybody a chance to say that I didn’t need to be in love with you—that your money was a sufficient bait?”
Miss Birrell was not at all past blushing, and she did it very prettily.
“You are so boyishly personal!” she laughed, and the fact that she did not resent the personality was an ample measure of the degree to which their intimacy had progressed. And then: “You promised me that you were going to be sensible and straightforward, and all those things. You said you were going to be entirely frank with Eliz—with Miss Wardwell, telling her that you haven’t insisted upon her naming the day because you think you ought to have means of your own, first. Have you done this?”
“No, I haven’t—not yet.”
“Why haven’t you? You owe it to her, don’t you?”