“Oh, Mr. Kilgariff!” she exclaimed, in embarrassment, “I didn’t know you were here. You must think me a silly girl to talk in that way with a horse.”
“Not at all,” he answered; “the horse seemed to like your caressing, and as for me, I enjoyed seeing it more than I can say.”
“Then you wanted to laugh at me.”
“By no means. I was only admiring the gentleness and kindliness of your winning ways. The thought that was uppermost in my mind was that I no longer wondered at the fascination you seem to exercise over animals. Your manner with them is such, and your voice is such, that they cannot help loving you. Even a man would be helpless if you treated him so.”
“Oh, but I could never do that—at least, well—I mean I could—” There the speech broke down, simply because the girl, now flushing crimson, knew not how to finish it. The thought that had suddenly come into her mind she would not utter, and she could think of no other that she might substitute for it.
But her flushed face and embarrassment told Kilgariff something that the girl herself did not yet know—something that sent a thrill of gladness through him in the first moment, but filled him in the next with regretful apprehension. He saw at once that that had happened which he had intended should never happen. Unconsciously, or at least subconsciously, Evelyn Byrd had come to think of him—or, more strictly speaking, to feel toward him without thinking—in a way that signified something more than friendship, something quite unrecognised by herself. Instantly the questions arose in his mind: “What shall I do? Is it too late to prevent this mischief, if I go away at once? If not, how shall I avoid a further wrong? Shall I go away, leaving her to work out her own salvation as best she can? Or shall I abandon my purpose and suffer myself to win her love completely? And in that case how shall I ever atone to her for the wrong I do her? I must in that case deal honestly and truthfully with her, telling her all about myself, so that she may know the worst. Perhaps then she will be repelled and no longer feel even friendship for a man living under such disgrace as mine. It will be painful for me to do that, but I must not consider my own feelings. It is my duty to face these circumstances in the same spirit in which I must face the dangers and hardships of war.”
All this flashed through his mind in an instant, but, without working out the problem to a conclusion, he set himself to relieve the evident embarrassment of the girl—an embarrassment caused chiefly by her consciousness that she had felt embarrassment and shown it. He resolutely controlled himself in voice and manner and turned the conversation into less dangerous channels.
“You were startled at seeing me,” he said, “because you did not know I was here. I came ‘like a thief in the night.’ I got here about midnight, after a hard ride from Petersburg. I saw the horse groomed and fed, and then went to the house and crept softly up the stairs to the room I occupied when I was at Wyanoke before. I came to let Arthur have a look at my wound—”
“Oh, are you wounded again?” interrupted the girl, with a pained eagerness over which a moment later she again flushed in shamed embarrassment.