“Do you fancy that my going to Mrs. Abington to plead for him will have any effect upon her? Do you really believe that all the eloquence of man has any influence upon a woman with a whim?”
“Ah, she will listen to you—you will be able to persuade her. She cares for you, Dick—I know that.”
He looked at her wonderingly. How was it possible, he asked himself, that she had found out Mrs. Abington’s secret? He himself had not found it out of his own accord, and he was a man. (He ventured to assume that such secrets were more likely to be guessed by a man than by a woman.)
“She likes me—yes, I suppose—in a way,” he said. “But I am not sure that this fact would make her the more ready to abandon a whim of the moment. On the contrary——”
“Ah, Dick, will you not help us?” she cried. “Surely if she cares about you——”
“Dear Betsy, I think we should do well to avoid giving any consideration to that particular point,” said Dick hastily. “I will go to Mrs. Abington and make an appeal to her, but ’twill not be on the ground that she cares for me; in fact, I do not at this moment know on what ground I can appeal to her.”
“But you will go? Ah, I knew that we could depend on you to do your best for us, Dick,” said she, and there passed over her face a glimpse of gladness—a flash of sunshine making more transparent the azure of her eyes. “You are the one whom I can always trust, dear Dick, because I know that you can always trust yourself.”
“I have learned that from you, my Betsy; I can stand face to face with you, and yet—I can trust myself.”
“Ah, do not say that you learned it from me,” she cried. She had turned away from him suddenly and was looking pensively at the hand which she had rested on the back of a chair. “If you could know what is in my heart, Dick, you would not talk about learning anything from me—alas—! alas!”
“You can trust your heart,” he said—“you can trust your heart, for it is true.”