“You can tell me nothing I do not know,” said Cicely. “My cousin has told me everything.”
“He—Mr. Fawcett—Trevor! He has told you!” cried Geneviève in bewildered amazement. “How can that be? He has told you, and you—you have forgiven him? It remains but for me to go home and be forgotten. But, oh! that I had never come here.”
“I have forgiven him,” said Cicely, ignoring the last sentences; “but, Geneviève, I did not find it easy. I blame him far—far more than you.”
Geneviève looked up again with a sparkle of hope in her eyes. “Cicely,” she whispered, and her face grew crimson, “Cicely, you must remember that when I—when I first began to care so much for him, I knew not that he was more to you than a cousin.”
“I know that. I have not forgotten it,” said Cicely, while a quick look of pain contracted her fair forehead. “I know that, it was my own fault,” she added in a low voice as if thinking aloud. “But as if I could ever have thought of Trevor—! I have not forgotten that, Geneviève,” she repeated. “At first, too, he thought you knew, he thought you looked upon him as a sort of a brother.”
“And so you have forgiven him?” said Geneviève again.
“What do you mean by ‘forgiving’? I have forgiven him, but—of course, knowing what I do now, it is impossible that things can be as they were.”
“You will not marry him! Do you mean that, Cicely? Ah! then it is as I said—you do not, you cannot care for him!” exclaimed Geneviève excitedly.
Hitherto Cicely had completely preserved her self-control. Now, for the first time, it threatened to desert her. A rush of sudden indignation made her eyes sparkle and her cheeks glow.
“How dare you say so?” she exclaimed. “Is it not enough—what I have to bear—without my being taunted with indifference, Geneviève?” She went on more calmly. “You must not speak to me in that way. I do not ask to be thought about at all. What I have to do, I will go through with, but at least you need not speak about me at all, whatever you think.”