"Are—are—you tired of me then?" she said.
"Ah, my dear!" Katherine exclaimed. And the exclamation was more reassuring, somehow, than any denial could have been.
"After all," Honoria went on, "I really don't see why you're to have a monopoly of faithfulness. There's selfishness now, if you like—to appropriate a virtue en bloc not leaving a rag, not the veriest scrappit of it for anybody else! And then, has it never occurred to you, that I may be just every bit as greedy of your companionship as you of mine—more so, I fancy, because—because——"
Honoria bowed her head and kissed the hand she held, once again.
"You see—I know it sounds as if I was rather a beast—perhaps I am—but I never cared for any one—really to care, I mean—till I cared for you."
"My dear!"—Katherine said again, wondering, shrinking somewhat, at once touched and almost repulsed. The younger woman's attitude was so far removed from her own experience.
"Does it displease you? Does it seem to you unnatural?" Honoria asked quickly.
"A little," Lady Calmady answered, smiling, yet very tenderly.
"All the same it's quite true. You opened a door, somehow, that had always been shut. I hardly believed in its existence. Of course I had read plenty about the—affections, shall we call them? And had heard women and girls, and men, too, for that matter, talk about them pretty freely. But it bored me a good deal. I thought it all rather silly, and rather nasty perhaps."—Honoria shook her head. "It didn't appeal to me in the least. But when you opened the door"—she paused, her face very grave, yet with a smile on it, as she looked away at the little figures anticking upon the hearth. "Oh, dear me, I own I was half scared," she said, "it let in such a lot of light!"
But, for this speech, Lady Calmady had no immediate answer. And so the quiet came back, settling down sensibly on the room again—even as, when at dawn the camp is struck, the secular quiet of the desert comes back and possesses its own again. And, in obedience to that quiet, Katherine's hand rested passively in the hand of her companion, while she gazed wonderingly at the delicate, half-averted face, serious, lit up by the eagerness of a vital enthusiasm. And, having a somewhat sorrowful fund of learning to draw upon in respect of the dangers all eccentricity, either of character or development, inevitably brings along with it, she trembled, divining that noble and strong and pure though it was, that face, and the temperament disclosed by it, might work sorrow, both to its possessor and to others, unless the enthusiasm animating it should find some issue at once large and simple enough to engage its whole aspiration and power of work.