“I know nothing!” he answered—“I may guess—but guessing is risky. I prefer to hear.”
“So you shall hear,”—and she drew a little closer to him—“If I express myself foolishly you must tell me,—if you think me officious or over-bold, you must reprove me—there is only one thing I will not bear from you, and that is, want of confidence!”
He looked at her in something of surprise.
“Want of confidence? My dear Miss Diana, you surely cannot complain on that score! I have trusted you more than I have ever trusted any man or any woman——”
“Yes,” she interrupted him, quickly—“I know that wherever it is absolutely necessary to trust me you have done so. But where you think it is un-necessary, you have not. For example—why don’t you tell me just straight what you mean to do with me?”
His dark, lustrous eyes flashed up under their drooping lids.
“What I mean to do with you?” he repeated—“Why what do you imagine——”
“I imagine nothing,” she answered, quietly. “The things you teach are beyond all imagination! But see!—I have signed myself and my services away to you for a certain time, and as you have yourself said, you did not engage me merely to copy old Latin script. What you really want of me is, as I begin to understand, just what the vivisector wants with the animal he experiments upon. If this is so, I offer no opposition. I am not afraid of death—for I am out of love with life. But I want to know your aims—I want to understand the actual thing you are striving for. I shall be better able to help you if I know. You put me through one test yesterday—you saw for yourself that I had no fear of the death or life properties of the thing I took from your hand without any hesitation—I have not even spoken of the amazing and terrifying sensations it gave me—I am ready to take it again at any moment. You have a willing servant in me—but, as I say, I feel I could help you more if I knew the ultimate end for which you work,—and you must trust me!”
He listened attentively to every word,—charmed with the silvery softness of her voice and its earnest yet delicate inflections.
“I do trust you!” he said, when she had ceased speaking. “If I did not, you would not be here a day. I trusted you from the moment I saw you. If I had not, I should never have engaged you. So be satisfied on that score. For the rest—well!—I confess I have hesitated to tell you more than (as you put it) seemed necessary for you to know,—the old fear and the narrow miscomprehension of woman is still inherent in me, as in all of my sex, though I do my best to eliminate it,—and I have thought that perhaps if I told you all my intentions with regard to yourself, you might, at the crucial moment, shrink back and fail me——”