“No, I won’t,—honour bright.”
“Well,” she said, hanging her head, “it is because I have none of that feeling of delicious shyness that novels tell us should overpower us in the presence of the beloved one.”
Captain Fordyce, in spite of his promise, burst into a laugh.
“It is a proof,” she said, in an injured tone, “a sure proof. I can never feel that way with you. I cannot tremble at your footstep and blush when I look at you; therefore, I am not in love with you. I shall never be in love with any one.”
There was a half-revealed anxiety in her voice, and her husband stopped laughing. “Take into account the fact that I have been before you ever since the dawning of your intelligence,” he said, soberly. “You don’t want to blush before such a familiar object. The love that increases by degrees is so like friendship that it can never be violent, some one says.”
“It seems to me that the bloom was taken off my love affair,” said the girl, in a troubled voice.“ I wish I had not known you all my life.”
An unhappy frown settled on her husband’s brow; and he was muttering something about regret for having disturbed her girlish ideals, when she interrupted him.
“What a wretch I am to say such things! You have been so good to me all these years. I don’t believe there is another man in the world who would have put up with me. ’Steban, what makes me so capricious and unsettled?”
“What made you?” he said, pointedly. “You are not now.”
“But I dare say I shall be again. You don’t understand me, ’Steban. I feel as if I belonged to quite a different race from you. You are more like dogs and horses and those things. You can always be depended on. I know one thing will make you angry and another will make you happy. While I,—why, a thing that charms me to-day may disgust me to-morrow, or it may charm me again. I can’t tell. Oh, dear, I wish I were a man!” and she wearily subsided.