Trevor hesitated. “You force me to speak plainly,” he said. “I mean that you are too proud to marry me now because—because you are no longer rich.”
“Because I am no longer rich. Ah, it is that you are thinking of! Ah! yes—I understand you now. But oh, how little you understand me!” She looked up in his face with a strange light in her eyes. “Do you think that that would ever have parted us? Do you think I should not have loved to owe everything I had to you? Do you think my pride so paltry a thing as to be weighed against money?”
“No,” said Trevor gloomily. “I found it difficult to believe it. But what else was I to think? How could I explain your change to me? How am I to explain what you tell me now?”
“Trevor,” said Cicely solemnly, “you know my reason.”
“I do not,” he answered doggedly.
“Do you not know,” she went on, “that I am only doing what you meant to do? Why you have changed in your intention I cannot tell, unless, yes unless, it was out of pity for me. Was it out of pity for me, Trevor?”
Her voice quivered, there were tears in her eyes now.
“Cicely, you will drive me mad unless you will tell me what you mean,” exclaimed Trevor. “Speak plainly, I entreat you.”
He was braving it out, but Cicely could perceive his increasing nervousness and uneasiness.
“I will speak plainly,” she said calmly. “What you intended to do was to break off our engagement because you had found out that you cared for—for some one else more than for me. I don’t know if you deserve blame for its being so; I cannot judge. But for one thing you deserve blame, and that is for having deceived me, Trevor—for having allowed me to go on thinking of myself as belonging to you, when—when you loved her and not me. Oh, that part of it is horrible!”