'That I helped him over a few stiles?' returned Langham calmly. 'Yes, there was a time when I was capable of that—there was a time when I could teach, and teach with pleasure.' He paused. Rose could have scourged herself for the tremor she felt creeping over her. Why should it be to her so new and strange a thing that a man, especially a man of these years and this calibre, should confide in her, should speak to her intimately of himself? After all, she said to herself angrily, with a terrified sense of importance, she was a child no longer, though her mother and sisters would treat her as one. 'When we were chatting the other night,' he went on, turning to her again as he stood leaning on the gate, 'do you know what it was struck me most?'
His tone had in it the most delicate, the most friendly deference. But Rose flushed furiously.
'That girls are very ready to talk about themselves, I imagine,' she said scornfully.
'Not at all! Not for a moment! No, but it seemed to me so pathetic, so strange that anybody should wish for anything so much as you wished for the musician's life.'
'And you never wish for anything?' she cried.
'When Elsmere was at college,' he said, smiling, 'I believe I wished he should get a first class. This year I have certainly wished to say good-bye to St. Anselm's, and to turn my back for good and all on my men. I can't remember that I have wished for anything else for six years.'
She looked at him perplexed. Was his manner merely languid, or was it from him that the emotion she felt invading herself first started? She tried to shake it off.
'And I am just a bundle of wants,' she said, half-mockingly. 'Generally speaking I am in the condition of being ready to barter all I have for some folly or other—one in the morning, another in the afternoon. What have you to say to such people, Mr. Langham?'
Her eyes challenged him magnificently, mostly out of sheer nervousness. But the face they rested on seemed suddenly to turn to stone before her. The life died out of it. It grew still and rigid.