There was not much sleep for Geoffrey that night. He lay through the long hours thinking of his love for Gladys, and half believing, yet hardly daring to hope, that she was beginning to return it.
Her manner toward him during the evening, her glad, even joyful greeting when he entered Mrs. Loring’s drawing-room, her shy, sweet glances, while talking with him, and the ever ready color which leaped into her cheeks beneath his fond gaze, all thrilled him with the blissful conviction that she was not indifferent to him.
And yet this only increased his unhappiness—to feel that he might win her, and yet could not without being guilty of both treachery and ingratitude toward the man from whom he had received such lasting benefits, and who had stood in the place of a father to him.
“But my life will be ruined if I cannot win her,” he said, a sort of dull despair settling down upon his heart at the mere thought. “I have always been determined to make the most of my advantages for her sake—that I might be worthy of her; I have resolved from the first that no one should excel me, and that when I should be through with my college course I would battle, with all the energy I possess, for a high position in the world to offer her. But what will it all amount to if, in the meantime, some one else steals my darling from me!—if, while my own lips are sealed, from a sense of honor, some other man wins the heart I covet, and I have to see her become his wife? Good heavens! I could not bear it—it would destroy my ambition—it would make a wreck of me.”
He tossed and turned upon his pillow in an agony of unrest and apprehension, the future looking darker and more hopeless to him with every waning hour, and when at last morning dawned he arose looking haggard and almost ill from the conflict through which he had passed.
When the breakfast bell rang he shrank, with positive pain, from going below to meet his kind friends with this burden on his heart.
But he stopped suddenly while in the act of crossing the threshold of his room, his eye lighting, a vivid flush rising to his brow, as some thought flashed upon his mind.
“I will do it,” he murmured, resolute lines settling about his mouth. “I will go directly to Uncle August and confess my love for Gladys in a manly, straightforward way, and if he does not oppose me—if he betrays no repugnance to such a union, I will no longer conceal my feelings from her, although it may be years before I shall dare to ask her to share my fortunes. I know if I can have before me the hope that she will some day become my wife, that no goal will be too difficult for me to attain. I shall be able to remove mountains, for her dear sake. But if he shrinks in the least from giving me his only child, I will sacrifice every hope—I will go away and hide myself and my despair from every eye, rather than he should think me ungrateful for all that he has done for me.”
Having made these resolutions, a new hope seemed to animate him, the clouds cleared from his brow, his heart grew lighter, and he descended to the dining-room looking more like himself.
Still Mr. Huntress noticed his paleness and the unusual gravity of his manner, and wondered at it, for he had seemed remarkably cheerful, even gay, the previous evening at Mrs. Loring’s.