"Then you promise? You will count on the money?" said Cecil, not much flattered at being supposed only to act up to the inevitable instincts of her sex.
"Good heavens, Cecil! no; I am not such an unprincipled brute as to rob you of a penny. Under no possible circumstances could I touch—"
"Under no possible circumstances?" leapt out before she could restrain her speech. Had the meaning escaped him, the eloquent blood which rushed over neck and brow must have betrayed it completely.
Bertie, who had been speaking without motive, was taken by surprise as the sense of her impulsive words flashed on his brain.
"My darling Cecil!"
Cecil, the colour of a carnation, and expiring with embarrassment, raised her eyes, and encountered his fixed on her with a fond, sad, but not responsive expression. If shame could kill, she had received her coup de grâce that moment. He had understood, and yet said nothing.
The most rapturous gratitude on his part would hardly have reconciled her to herself; not to be met half-way was ignominious rejection.
It had all been the work of one moment, and relief came in the next with the entrance of Colonel Rolleston. Cecil, feeling as if delivered from a spell, got out of the room, and entrenched herself in her own, where her thoughts became almost unendurable.
In horror at what she had done, her first wish was never to see Bertie again. Every particle of pleasure in his society must now be over since that one mad, unguarded sentence.
"I might have known," thought she, bitterly, "that that false, caressing manner of his never meant anything. I have seen it with a dozen girls—even Bluebell,"—here she winced; "and yet in the face of all probability I must needs believe myself more to him than any one, because it suits him to make me the receptacle of his worries. Well, he is disinterested, at any rate, since all my money has no more attractions for him than myself."