“Clare has told you all, I suppose?”
“She told me that you had confessed to her what you confessed to me,” said Agnes.
“What I confessed to you?” he repeated in a somewhat startled tone. “What I confessed—long ago?”
“Well, that is not just what I meant to say,” replied Agnes. “You confessed to me a few days ago that you had fallen in love with her. But curiously enough, the way you took me up serves to lead in the same direction. Only you were, of course, a different person altogether in those days: we change every seven years, don't we?”
“I am the luckiest man alive!” said he, ignoring her disagreeable reminiscence. “I am no longer young and my adventures have told on me, and yet—I am sure you told her that you considered me the luckiest man living!”
“I told her that if she wished to be happy she should put an ocean between you and herself.”
His voice was full of reproach—a kind of grieved reproach, as he said:
“You told her that? Why should you tell her that? Is it because of the past—that foolish past of a boy and girl”—
“No: I was not thinking of the past; it was of the future I was thinking,” she said.
“The future?”