'Never.'
Dalton was colouring deeply now, and she extracted his answers from him 'as if she had been extracting his teeth,' as she afterwards told Alison.
'Now, however, under better auspices, and at home, I may wish to change,' he began.
'Change what?' interrupted Mrs. Trelawney, with a curious sharpness of tone; 'to reform? I have read that we often hear of a woman marrying a man to reform him, but that no one ever heard of a man marrying a woman to reform her.'
Dalton felt that his love-making, if love-making it was, took a strange turn now, and that she was infusing banter or rebuke into the conversation.
'I cannot comprehend, Mrs. Trelawney, how it is that when I am with you,' said Dalton, gravely, with a soft and half-broken voice, 'there comes back upon me much of my past life, or rather a portion of it, that I would fain forget.'
'How is this?'
'Because you have some strange and magnetic influence over me, to which I have not as yet the key. I have sought to bury, to forget that past I refer to—to live it down——'
'I have no wish to pry into your secrets, Captain Dalton, nor to act the part of a Father Confessor, so pray don't confide in me,' said Mrs. Trelawney, with a—for her—curious hardness in her usually sweet voice. 'I have read somewhere that life itself, from the cradle to the grave, is but a kind of gloaming hour, wherein mortals grope dimly after happiness, and find it not.'
'I would that the happiness of my future life lay in your hands, Mrs. Trelawney,' said Dalton, with an expression of eye and tone of voice there was no mistaking.