“No indeed, you couldn’t go to Kitty.” He smiled at her hard as he added: “I should have liked to see you go to Kitty! Therefore exactly is it that I’ve set you adrift—that I’ve darkened and poisoned your days. You’re paying with your comfort, with your peace, for having joined so gallantly in my grand remonstrance.”
She shook her head, turning from him, but then turned back again—as if accepting, as if even relieved by, this version of the prime cause of her state. “Why do you talk of it as ‘paying’—if it’s all to come back to my being paid? I mean by your blest success—if you really do what you want.”
“I have your word for it,” he searchingly said, “that our really pulling it off together will make up to you——?”
“I should be ashamed if it didn’t, for everything!”—she took the question from his mouth. “I believe in such a cause exactly as you do—and found a lesson, at Dedborough, in your frankness and your faith.”
“Then you’ll help me no end,” he said all simply and sincerely.
“You’ve helped me already”—that she gave him straight back. And on it they stayed a moment, their strenuous faces more intensely communing.
“You’re very wonderful—for a girl!” Hugh brought out.
“One has to be a girl, naturally, to be a daughter of one’s house,” she laughed; “and that’s all I am of ours—but a true and a right and a straight one.”
He glowed with his admiration. “You’re splendid!”
That might be or not, her light shrug intimated; she gave it, at any rate, the go-by and more exactly stated her case. “I see our situation.”