“No—not but that I should have been glad to do it, but my mother had a small income of her own. She insisted on dividing it with you.”
“I must love her more for her generosity,” Thea cried.
“And me less since you know that you owe me no obligation,” he said, coldly.
“You saved my life,” she answered, in a whisper so freighted with feeling that he could not reply to her.
It was not gratitude he wanted, it was love. Yet he could not tell her so. He was only her elderly guardian.
He glanced around at her and saw tears hanging on the thick fringe of her gold-brown lashes.
“Are you grieved, Sweetheart, because I expressed myself so plainly about your verses?” he asked.
“I thank you for your frankness, but I am grieved that I am not clever,” she said.
“Poor little one! Yet you can not expect to have the earth. When God made you so beautiful that it is a pleasure simply to look at you, He gave you your share of earthly favors.”
She brushed away the pearly tears with a tiny cobweb lace handkerchief and said, wistfully: