"Oh, but you were so stupid."
"Yes, I know. I have been stupid for years past."
Miss Beauclerc laughed. "And you think that stopping away will cure you?"
"It will not cure me; years will not cure me," he passionately broke forth, in a tone whose anguish was irrepressible. "Absence and you alone will do that. When I go to the university——" He stopped, unable to proceed.
"When you go to the university you will come back a wise man. Henry," she continued, changing her manner to seriousness, "it was the height of folly to suffer yourself to care for me. If I—if it were reciprocated, and I cared for you, if I were dying of love for you, there are barriers on all sides, and in all ways."
"I am aware of it. There is the barrier between us of disparity of years; there is a wide barrier of station; and there is the greatest barrier of all, want of love on your side. I know that my loving you has been nothing short of madness, from the first: madness and double madness since I knew where your heart was given."
"So you will retain that crotchet in your head!"
"It is no crotchet. Do you think my loving eyes—my jealous eyes, if you so will it—have been deceived? You must be happy, now that he has come back to Westerbury."
"Stupid!" echoed Miss Beauclerc.
"But it has been your fault, Georgina," he resumed, reverting to himself. "I must reiterate it. You saw what my feelings were becoming for you, and you did all you could to draw them on; you may have deemed me a child then in years; you knew I was not, in heart. They might have been checked in the onset, and repressed: why did you not do it? why did you do just the contrary, and give me encouragement? You called it flirting; you thought it good sport: but you should have remembered that what is sport to one, may be death to another."