“I’ve been coming to you a hundred times, but my cursed cowardice has kept me back, and everything has been against me. There has been your trouble.”
Claire’s hands shrank from him again.
“Then it was bad enough about father without this horrible charge.”
Claire’s face grew hard and cold, and in a moment she seemed ten years older.
“Then there was poor Fred: Rockley’s servant in my regiment. You don’t know what a position mine has been.”
Claire made no movement now. Her heart seemed to be hardening against the lad, and she shrank from him a little, but he clung to her tightly with his face hidden, and went on in the same piteous, boyish wail.
“I’ve been half mad sometimes about you and your troubles—”
Claire’s hands began to rise again and tremble over his head.
“Sometimes about myself, and I’ve felt as if I was the most unlucky fellow in the world.”
There was a pause here, broken by the lad’s passionate sobs.