She could not remember that she was no longer the little girl who used to lavish so many sisterly caresses upon the boy Oliver; neither did she reflect that she was now a young lady of seventeen, and he a man of twenty-one, possessing a man’s heart, even though the casket which enshrined that heart was blighted and deformed.
“I want to put my head in your lap just as I used to do,” she said; and, drawing the stool closer to him, she rested her burning cheek upon his knee, and then waited for him to speak.
“You have been crying, Milly,” he said at last, and she replied:
“Yes, I’ve had an awful day. Lilian led me into confessing that I loved somebody, never dreaming that she would tell it to Lawrence; but she did, and she told him, too, that I said I hated all the Thorntons. Oh, Oliver, what must he think of me?”
“For loving somebody or hating the Thorntons, which?” Oliver asked, and Mildred replied:
“Both are bad enough, but I can’t bear to have him think I hate him, for I don’t. I,—oh, Oliver, can’t you guess? don’t you know?—though why should you when you have loved only me?”
“Only you, Milly,—only you,” said Oliver, while there came a mist before his eyes as he thought of the hopeless anguish the loving her had brought him.
But not for the world would he suffer her to know of the love which had become a part of his very life, and he was glad that it was growing dark, so she could not see the whiteness of his face, nor the effort that it cost him to say in his usually quiet tone:
“Milly, do you love Lawrence Thornton?”
He knew she did, but he would rather she should tell him so, for he fancied that might help kill the pain which was gnawing at his heart.