“No, to be sure. Girls marry for money sometimes. I heard Mrs. Darrell say that one of the Penwoods, of Windsor, married a horrid, old, rich city man for the sake of his money. But I don’t think Eleanor would do that sort of thing. Only it seems so funny that she should have been in love with you all the time.”
“All what time?”
“Why, all the time she and I were together. How could she help talking of you, I wonder?”
The lawyer bit his lip.
“She never talked of me, then?” he said, with a feeble attempt to make his tone careless.
“Oh, yes, she spoke of you sometimes, of course; but not in that way.”
“Not in what way? When will you learn to express yourself clearly, Miss Mason? Are you going to be a child all your life?”
Gilbert Monckton’s ward looked up at him with a half comic look of terror. He was not accustomed to speak so sharply to her.
“Don’t be angry, please,” she said, “I know I don’t always express myself clearly. I dare say it’s because I used to get other girls to do my themes—they call exercises in composition themes, you know—when I was at school. I mean that Eleanor didn’t talk of you as if she was in love with you—not as I talk—not as I should talk of any one if I were in love with them,” added the young lady, blushing very much as she corrected herself.
Miss Mason had only one idea of the outer evidences of the master-passion. A secret or unrequited affection, which did not make itself known by copious quotations of Percy Shelley and Letitia London, was in her mind a very commonplace affair.