"If you say that then you will make me feel that I am not wanted. I should hate to think that you regard me as a person who must be entertained. If I thought that my presence here, Homewood, made the very smallest difference to your arrangements, then I should want to leave you at once!"
"And I hope that you won't think of leaving for a long while to come," said Allan heartily.
"But you must—must give him a little more time, Allan," Kathleen said presently. "He is your guest——"
"But your old friend, dear, you and he have far more to talk about than he and I could have! You have the past to dig in!" He smiled.
The past—how little he knew! Her heart smote her. She ought to have told him and yet, after all, how little was there to tell? The man she had loved had come back and she had discovered that she had lived in a fool's paradise, that she had not loved the man, but rather had loved her love for him, had idealised it and had made of it the sweetest, holiest and best thing in her life. And now at last with eyes open and clear, she could see that her gold had been tinsel after all, her flowers so fresh and glorious and beautiful had been but poor counterfeits of paper or coloured rag, the hero so noble, so brave, so unselfish and splendid, whose image she had enshrined in her heart was after all but a very ordinary man, very weak and selfish and lacking all those fine qualities with which in her heart she had endowed her childhood's knight.
And now the guests were gone, all but Harold Scarsdale—and how she wished that he too had gone with the others—She and Allan were alone and the time had come to tell him that wonderful news!
And because the time had come, there came to Kathleen a thousand fears. There came too a strange sense of modesty, a shrinking that would not be there if only he loved her. If only he loved her—would he be glad, glad and proud, or would he be sorry and disappointed, worst of all perhaps he would be indifferent! And that would be the hardest, the cruelest thing of all to bear.
Yet she must tell him.
To-night, yes to-night, and yet when to-night came she—coward-like—put it off.
"To-morrow," she said, "I will tell him in the sunshine in the garden, so that I may watch his face and know—know without spoken words what his thoughts and feelings are——"