“I don’t want to remember them—and what have they to do with what concerns us now?” said the girl.
There was a new note in the man’s voice that was almost exultant in its quietness. “A good deal, I think. Hetty, if you hadn’t driven so often beside me here, would you have done what you have to-night?”
“No,” said the girl tremulously.
“No,” Grant said. “You have done a rash as well as a very generous thing.”
“It was rash; but what could I do? We were, as you remind me, good friends once.”
“Yes,” he said. “I can’t thank you, Hetty—thanks of any kind wouldn’t be adequate—and there is nothing else I can offer to show my gratitude, because all I had was yours already. You have known that a long while, haven’t you?”
The girl looked away from him. “I was not good enough to understand its value at first, and when I did I tried to make you take it back.”
“I couldn’t,” he said gently. “It was perhaps worth very little; but it was all I had, and—since that day by the river—I never asked for anything in return. It was very hard not to now and then, but I saw that you had only kindness to spare for me.”
“Then why do you talk of it again?”
“I think,” said Grant very quietly, “it is different now. After to-night nothing can be quite the same again. Hetty, dear, if you had missed me and I had ridden on to the bridge——”