He turned and pressed his lips to the tear-wet cheek, and it seemed to him that it suddenly grew cold, the fair head drooped against him, the form grew limp in his arms. For a moment he held her quite unconscious, then she revived and struggled from his clasp.
“Let me go,” she said, with sudden coldness; and the next moment, alone in her room, she fell sobbing on the bed.
“His sister!” she moaned. “His sister, dear Heaven! just in the moment when I realized I loved him and hoped—hoped—he was going to ask me to be his wife!”
CHAPTER XXXVI.
Poor little Thea! she knew now why she had suffered with that late remorse for her scorn of her rejected lovers. It was because she had realized in her own heart all the sweetness and the pain of real love, and out of this knowledge could sympathize with the emotion which had once been the butt of her scornful ridicule.
All in a moment, as it were, while she had stood in the warm clasp of Norman de Vere’s arm, there had come to her a realization of the truth. She loved her guardian, not with the grateful affection of a ward, but with a woman’s devotion. It seemed to her now that she had loved him thus since that first night when he had smiled into her eyes and bid her welcome to his home; but the knowledge might have lain dormant in her mind much longer had not Norman’s sudden tenderness awakened her to the truth. All in one dizzy moment she knew that she loved him and believed that he loved her, that he was going to tell her so, and ask her to be his wife.
As swift and sudden as was her hope followed the cruel downfall. She was dazed, breathless, with its terrible suddenness. Crouching on her bed, she wept with passionate abandon.
“Why did I ever come here?” she moaned, despairingly, “and why was it that I learned to love him, this selfish, cold-hearted man? I can not understand it. He did not try to win me,” her pride rising in arms at the thought that she had given her heart unsought.
The love and admiration that had always surrounded Thea had naturally given her a good opinion of her own self. She had heard so often that she was beautiful, that it would have been an affectation to pretend not to know it. But until now she had not cared about it—she had taken it as a matter of course.
“Beauty is not all,” she sighed now, with bitter chagrin. “Perhaps he has never even noticed that I am passably pretty. He has seen very beautiful women, of course—proud, cultured, wealthy women—his equals in everything, not dependent little nobodies like me.”