“Oh! Ry, if you knew how happy that makes me!” she exclaimed. But there was that in the exclamation which seemed to say, “If only I could be sure that you meant it.”
“Of course I will—that is, everything that could possibly interest you, for there are very small worries as well as great ones; and you know I really can’t undertake to remember everything.”
“Of course, darling,” she answered; “I only meant that if anything were really—any great anxiety—upon your mind, you would not be afraid to tell me. I’m not such a coward as I seem. You must not think me so foolish; and really, Ry, it pains me more to think that there is any anxiety weighing upon you, and concealed from me, than any disclosure could; and so I know—won’t you?”
“Haven’t I told you, darling, I really will,” he said, a little pettishly. “What an odd way you women have of making a fellow say the same thing over and over again. I wonder it does not tire you, I know it does us awfully. Now, there, see, I really do believe you are going to cry.”
“Oh, no, indeed!” she said, brightening up, and smiling with a sad, little effort.
“And now, kiss me, my poor, good little woman,—you’re not vexed with me?—no, I’m sure you’re not,” said he.
She smiled a very affectionate assurance.
“And really, you poor little thing, it is awfully late, and you must be tired, and I’ve been—no, not lecturing, I’ll never lecture, I hate it—but boring or teasing; I’m an odious dog, and I hate myself.”
So this little dialogue ended happily, and for a time Charles Fairfield forgot his anxieties, and a hundred pleasanter cares filled his young wife’s head.
In such monastic solitudes as Carwell Grange the days pass slowly, but the retrospect of a month or a year is marvellously short. Twelve hours without an event is very slow to get over. But that very monotony, which is the soul of tediousness, robs the background of all the irregularities and objects which arrest the eye and measure distance in review, and thus it cheats the eye.