Sometimes, remembering a passage here and a passage there—a look here, a look there—a touch, a tone, a sentence—her whole soul rose up and cried: “It is false, it is a mistake, he does love me, oh! he does—he does—he does—”
There would be a short space of passionate hope, and then calm reason would step in and say with inexorable firmness: “How can that be, since he goes away for no particular reason to the other side of the world, when everything at home needs his presence?”
Then would follow a period of terrible self-depreciation, when poor Eileen’s sensitive nature shrank back horrified from the thought of all she had given unasked—and her cheeks burned with a deep sense of shame that she had allowed herself to believe in love where apparently no love was.
Small wonder that her heart grew faint within her. The mountains understood, and the bay, and the lights and shadows, and the strip of turquoise—or it seemed to the sad dreamer that they did—and so upon every possible occasion she stole away to the solitude, to look out upon them all with a world of pain in her beautiful eyes, suffering mutely and alone.
Once or twice her mother had been about to speak, but with quick divination Eileen had seen and stayed her. The wound was too sore yet to bear any probing. She felt, at least, she must suffer alone.
“My child, you are looking ill,” her mother said at last, and there was a tremor in her voice that went to Eileen’s heart.
“I am quite well, mother dear,” she answered in that patient way of hers. “You must not trouble about me; there is no need for it.”
For answer Mrs Adair put her hand on the bright head beside her.
“I understand, my girlie,” she said in a pain-wrung voice. “I understand so well. God bless and help you and comfort you.”
Eileen could not trust herself to speak, but afterward she thanked God that He had given her so dear a mother.