“Alan,” she said, “I think that you are the biggest fool I ever knew—not but that a fool is rather refreshing when one lives among knaves.”
“I know I am a fool,” he answered. “If I wasn’t I should not have mentioned my misfortune to you, but sometimes things are too much for one. Forget it and forgive me.”
“Oh! yes,” she said; “I forgive you; a woman can generally forgive a man for being fond of her. Whatever she may be, she is ready to take a lenient view of his human weakness. But as to forgetting, that is a different matter. I don’t exactly see why I should be so anxious to forget, who haven’t many people to care about me,” and she looked at him in quite a new fashion, one indeed which gave him something of a shock, for he had not thought the nymph-like Barbara capable of such a look as that. She and any sort of passion had always seemed so far apart.
Now after all Alan was very much a man, if a modest one, with all a man’s instincts, and therefore there are appearances of the female face which even such as he could not entirely misinterpret.
“You—don’t—mean,” he said doubtfully, “you don’t really mean——” and he stood hesitating before her.
“If you would put your question a little more clearly, Alan, I might be able to give you an answer,” she replied, that quaint little smile of hers creeping to the corners of her mouth like sunshine through a mist of rain.
“You don’t really mean,” he went on, “that you care anything about me, like, like I have cared for you for years?”
“Oh! Alan,” she said, laughing outright, “why in the name of goodness shouldn’t I care about you? I don’t say that I do, mind, but why shouldn’t I? What is the gulf between us?”
“The old one,” he answered, “that between Dives and Lazarus—that between the rich and the poor.”
“Alan,” said Barbara, looking down, “I don’t know what has come over me, but for some unexplained and inexplicable reason I am inclined to give Lazarus a lead—across that gulf, the first one, I mean, not the second!”