“And why—are you not happy?”
“Why!” she murmured.
She waited for him to proceed, until perhaps he should put to her the question which she had awaited for days past. But no doubt it was owing to a sense of honour and decency that he did not ask it; it was but such a little while ago as yet that she had written to Otto. Still she thought she could detect the presence of love beneath his soft accents, and she looked at him. A ray of sunshine glinted along the window-curtain into the room and fell upon him where he sat, surrounding him with a kind of halo, and she started back in sudden alarm when she observed by that brilliant light how he resembled her dead father. This alarm caused her heart to pulse the quicker, and she fancied that she loved Vincent for the sake of her father’s memory, because in him she saw a victim of the world’s conventionality, and thus she invested him with something ideal and romantic.
He, too, looked at her with pity in his heart, for he knew that she had flung away her happiness. He had often done so himself, he thought; but in his own case the fact had never disclosed itself to his eyes with such distinctness as it did now with regard to Eline. For a moment he wanted to tell her as much, but he could see no use in doing so, and so he said nothing. She would never have admitted it.
“Vincent!” she faltered at last, with her nerves painfully overstrung in the suspense of waiting, waiting for that which never came. “Vincent, tell me—perhaps we shall never see each other again—have you nothing—nothing to say to me?” [[231]]
“I have, and a good deal, Elly dear; I have to thank you for having tended and nursed me like a dear little girl, here in your own room, at a time when you yourself were suffering.”
“How do you know that I suffered?”
“I have a little knowledge of human nature.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t think so. I have not suffered, I pity—Otto, but I have not suffered myself.”