“I don’t know,” he said. “Everything might have been different.” He paused, then added: “You know. I think I have always loved you, Eileen, ever since you were a solemn-faced little girl; though it is only lately I have realised just all it meant. I know I have generally ran about with Paddy, and been far more with her, but she was like a boy friend, while you were always my ideal of all that is best and sweetest in a woman. It is only lately I have actually understood that all my life I should love you better than the whole world.”
“Oh, Jack!” she breathed, in a distressed voice, “please don’t go on.”
He smiled down at her, and there was something strangely beautiful in his smile.
“Yes, let me go on,” he said. “It does me good to speak of it. I am not one of those men who feel bitter about loving when it is not returned, and too vain to acknowledge that it is so. To me it is such a simple, natural thing to love you; and such an unlikely possibility that you should return my love. Perhaps, if I had been more of a man the last nine years, and had started to make my way in the world, and then come to you with something to offer, it might have been different; but now! ah! that is just the hard part of it all.”
“No, no, you mustn’t feel like that,” she cried. “What should we have done without you?—what would the aunties have done?—and I don’t think it would have made any difference, Jack.”
He looked at her searchingly.
“If there is someone else, Eileen, perhaps not, and yet—and yet—how often have you lectured me about being idle and good-for-nothing! Would to Heaven I had awakened, and listened to you sooner.”
She buried her face in her hands.
“I suppose I ought not to ask if there is someone else,” he said, watching her. “It would sound like an impertinence, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, Jack, don’t talk like this,” she begged. “Please, please forget about me. It hurts me so much to feel that I am hurting you.”