"If I have been vexed. Daisy, it is to find out a mistake—a great mistake of mine."
"What mistake, Cornelius?"
"Do you really want to know, Daisy?"
"Yes," I said, almost desperately, "I want to know."
There was a pause. He still stood by me, looking down in my face.
"Do not look so pale, and above all so frightened," he said, gently; "there is no need. How you tremble!" he added, taking my hand in both his, and speaking very sadly, "Oh, Daisy! Daisy!" And he turned his look away with a strange expression of disappointment and pain, of shame and mortification.
I hung down my head; I did not dare to look at him, to withdraw my hand, to move. I stood mutely expecting—what I knew not exactly; but I seemed to feel that it must be some shock, dreadful, because violent, that would perforce turn the current of my destiny, and compel it to flow through regions, where of itself, my will would never have led we. Vain fear; unfounded alarm. Cornelius turned to me, and said very calmly—
"The mistake into which I fell, was to think that we understood one another tacitly, Daisy. I do not love you now because I have reared you, but on your own merits, for the sake of that which you have become. And thus I thought that you too liked me, with a higher feeling than gratitude. In short, as I like you myself—as a very dear friend."
He spoke simply and naturally. I breathed freely.
"Oh! how good, how generous you are!" I exclaimed, moved to the heart by so much delicacy of affection. "You want to raise me to an equality with you. God bless you, Cornelius."