“What can have caused it?” she burst forth, giving full swing to the reins, and forgetting everything. “You can ask me that?”
Mr. Carlyle was struck dumb; but by some inexplicable laws of sympathy, a dim and very unpleasant consciousness of the truth began to steal over him.
“I don’t understand you, Barbara. If I have offended you in any way, I am truly sorry.”
“Truly sorry, no doubt!” was the retort, the sobs and the shrieks alarmingly near. “What do you care for me? If I go under the sod to-morrow,” stamping it with her foot, “you have your wife to care for; what am I?”
“Hush!” he interposed, glancing round, more mindful for her than she was for herself.
“Hush, yes! You would like me to hush; what is my misery to you? I would rather be in my grave, Archibald Carlyle, than endure the life I have led since you married her. My pain is greater than I well know how to bear.”
“I cannot affect to misunderstand you,” he said, feeling more at a nonplus than he had felt for many a day, and heartily wishing the whole female creation, save Isabel, somewhere. “But my dear Barbara. I never gave you cause to think I—that I—cared for you more than I did.”
“Never gave me cause!” she gasped. “When you have been coming to our house constantly, almost like my shadow; when you gave me this” dashing open her mantle, and holding up the locket to his view; “when you have been more intimate with me than a brother.”
“Stay, Barbara. There it is—a brother. I have been nothing else; it never occurred to me to be anything else,” he added, in his straightforward truth.
“Ay, as a brother, nothing else!” and her voice rose once more with her excitement; it seemed that she would not long control it. “What cared you for my feelings? What recked you that you gained my love?”