She cast a swift glance into his eager, impassioned face, and her eyes drooped once more.
“For me to say?” she repeated, falteringly. “I have nothing to say in the matter, Captain Venners.”
“Jessie, see here!” He flashed about and caught her hand in a swift, warm pressure. “I can bear this no longer, and I will not! Either you love me or you do not. Tell me the truth. I can try to bear disappointment like a man. It will be very, very hard, but it must be as you say. Listen, Jessie, and let me tell ‘the story of my thralldom.’ I love you—love you with all my heart and soul. I have been a wild sort of a fellow, flirting with every passably pretty woman who was silly enough to let me. I have flirted away my best days in this idle pastime, and have won for myself the unenviable reputation of a flirt; but lately I have awakened to a new life, new hopes, new ambition—say, rather, for the first time, real ambition. A feeling of disgust and aversion for my career as a trifler has taken possession of me. I feel the need of a real aim, a true object in existence. I have at last found the missing joy of my life which my heart has ever been seeking. In other words, I have learned to love with all my heart and strength—you! Is my love in vain, my darling? Is there no answering chord in your dear heart, no hope for me? Answer me, Jessie; for I am very, very unhappy in this long suspense.”
How could she doubt him? his pale, earnest face; the dark, passionate eyes, eager and beseeching, bent upon her own; the whole attitude of the man breathing the true, unchanging love which filled his heart.
Yet how could she believe him? Before her memory there danced a tantalizing vision—innumerable well-known flirtations, every one of which might mean as much as this, and more.
How did she know? She would not be the first woman who had been deceived by a man, and misled by specious pleading to her own unhappiness. She was not the first, and she would not be the last.
And Will Venners was so much sought after and admired, and so welcome in society, while she—what was she but a poor girl, a hired companion, paid the same as Betty Harwood, or any other hireling at Yorke Towers?
Jessie Glyndon was proud—very proud; and she felt a horrible fear that Will Venners was merely trifling with her, just for idle pastime. It might be amusement for him, but for her it would be death—worse than death; for Jessie Glyndon was the sort of woman who could not endure the burden of life if once deprived of love. She was all alone in the world, and accustomed to her cold, loveless existence; but once let the sun of affection arise upon her life, its setting would mean her utter ruin and destruction. Better to grope on in the darkness in her lonely way than to reach out and gather the proffered flower of love, only to see it wither in her grasp.
Jessie could not believe, with the poet, that—
“’Tis better to have loved and lost,