Volume One—Chapter Twenty Five.
A Revelation.
“Oh, May, May! As if I had not care and pain enough without this. Surely it cannot be true.”
“Hush! don’t make a fuss like that, you silly thing. You’ll have the people hearing you down in the street. How could I help it?”
“Help it? May, you must have been mad.”
“Oh! no, I wasn’t,” said Mrs Burnett, nestling into a corner of the couch in her father’s drawing-room. “I believe he was, though, poor fellow.”
She gazed up at her portrait with her pretty girlish face wrinkling up, and these wrinkles seeming to have had work to get the better of the dimples in her baby cheeks and chin.
“He was dreadfully fond of me, Claire,” she continued, “and I was very fond of him. And then, you see, we were both so young.”