“Well, you are safe—that is the chief thing,” she rejoined, making as though to depart. But presently she turned back. “Why are you so dreadfully poor—and everything?” she asked gently.
His eye wandered over the lake and back again before he answered her, in a dull, heavy tone: “I’ve had bad luck, and, when you get down, there are plenty to kick you farther.”
“You weren’t always poor as you are now—I mean long ago, when you were young.”
“I’m not so old,” he rejoined sluggishly—“only thirty-four.”
She could not suppress her astonishment. She looked at the hair already grey, the hard, pinched face, the lustreless eyes.
“Yet it must seem long to you,” she said with meaning. Now he laughed—a laugh sodden and mirthless. He was thinking of his boyhood. Everything, save one or two spots all fire or all darkness, was dim in his debilitated mind.
“Too far to go back,” he said, with a gleam of the intelligence which had been strong in him once.
She caught the gleam. She had wisdom beyond her years. It was the greater because her mother was dead, and she had had so much wealth to dispense, for her father was rich beyond counting, and she controlled his household, and helped to regulate his charities. She saw that he was not of the labouring classes, that he had known better days; his speech, if abrupt and cheerless, was grammatical.
“If you cannot go back, you can go forwards,” she said firmly. “Why should you be the only man in this beautiful land who lives like this, who is idle when there is so much to do, who sleeps in the daytime when there is so much time to sleep at night?”
A faint flush came on the greyish, colourless face. “I don’t sleep at night,” he returned moodily.