All these things added to the difficulty of his present task, but it was his habit to meet trouble of every kind half-way, to confront difficulty with courage and not with any show of the shrinking there might be in his mind.
He plunged at once into the matter in hand. Ordinarily he would have begun by addressing his companion as “Evelyn,” but for some reason which he did not stop to analyse, he felt now that he ought not to do so. Yet to address her in any other way, after having for so long called her by her first name, would be too marked a suggestion of reserve. So he avoided addressing her at all in any direct fashion.
“I have asked you to give me this half-hour because I feel that I owe you and myself a duty.”
He had no sooner uttered that sentence than he felt that it was a particularly bad beginning. In his own ears it sounded uncommonly like the introduction to a declaration of love, and he was annoyed with himself for his blundering. He began again, and tried to do so more circumspectly.
“I want to talk with you about a matter that touches your own happiness very closely, and may indeed affect your entire life.”
Another blundering sentence! Even more than the first it sounded to him like the preface to a formal courtship, and, realising the fact, Kilgariff made the matter worse by manifesting precisely such embarrassment as a lover might feel when about to put his fortune to the touch.
Evelyn was quick to see his embarrassment, though she probably had no clear idea of its cause, and she came to his relief by saying with a well-controlled and perfectly placid intonation:—
“I am deeply interested. I didn’t imagine myself a person of sufficient consequence for anybody to have important business affairs to discuss with me. Go on, please. What is it?”
“A little while ago,” he began again, this time approaching the subject with some directness, “I was summoned to meet a wounded Federal officer, who believed himself to be dying. Probably he was right. I do not know. However that may be, he believed that his end was near, and I think he tried to tell the truth—an art in which he has not had much practice in his evil life. I had known him for some years. He had injured me as no other man in all the world ever did or ever can again. There were many things that I wanted him to tell me about, and the time was very short; for I had got at the house in which he lay wounded only under escort of an armed force, and I knew that my escort could not long hold the position. By the time I had finished questioning him concerning the matters in which I was personally interested, the enemy was upon us in superior force, and we were compelled to retire. Just as I was quitting his bedside, he told me something that surprised and shocked me—something that deeply concerned you.”
“What was it, please?” asked the girl, now pale to the lips and nervously twisting her fingers together.