"Oh!" observed Agatha blankly, and knitted to the end of her needle without speaking. Apparently the path that had seemed so plain led nowhere, after all.
Forbes, too, seemed in no haste to speak. "Of course," he explained at last, "I'm very hopeful. If I make a complete recovery as the doctors tell me I'm likely to do, there's no reason why things shouldn't be as they were before."
Agatha laid down her knitting and regarded him fixedly, an upright crease between her brows. The tranquillity of his unconscious face gave the impression that she must have misunderstood him. "How were they before?" she asked bluntly.
Apparently he did not question her right to a categorical answer. "We had planned to be married in January till this came up. But of course I couldn't hold a girl like Julia when there's a possibility of my having to grope my way through life."
"No, of course not," agreed Agatha, with misleading calm. "But if she were enough in love with you to plan to marry you in January, I should suppose something would hold her, something you had nothing to do with."
There was a moment of rather tense silence. Then Forbes laughed out boyishly:
"You dear old soul," he cried, "you don't know how mid-Victorian that sounds. When you were a girl, women took all that sentimental stuff seriously; about sacrificing themselves for love, I mean. But you don't understand the modern girl. She's beyond that."
"I don't pretend to understand your Julia," agreed Agatha, her eyes aflame, "I don't want to."
Forbes laughed again, this time with a reservation in his mirth. "Look here," he said, "you mustn't criticize Julia, for then I can't talk to you about her, and that would be a deuced bore. And she's a queen. A girl of that sort is bound to know her value. Julia was really fond of me, not desperately in love as I was—as I am—that wasn't to be expected, but really fond of me and inclined to exaggerate ridiculously my small achievements. But of course it's out of the question for her to marry me if the rest of my life is to be a game of Blind Man's Buff."