“Oh! Mary,” it cried, and the sharp accent of pain which rang through the two little words went straight to Mary’s heart, “don’t misunderstand me. I want to be unselfish and brave, and just now it seemed to me that, if any one seemed to feel for me, I could not manage to get on. But I don’t want to make you unhappy, and you may talk to me if you like.”
Mary gently closed the door, then she came back to her sister, and drew her down on to a seat.
“What am I to say Lily? I wish I knew.”
“Anything,” replied Lilias; “you may say anything, Mary, except one thing.”
“And what is that?”
“Blame of him,” said Lilias, her eyes sparkling, “that, Mary, is the one thing I could not bear. I have made up my mind absolutely about this—if—if it is never explained, I will still keep to it, he is, in some way, not his own master.”
“But if it is so, Lilias, it still does not free him from blame, though it alters the kind. If he is not his own master, he should not have let himself got to care for you, and, still worse, have taught you to care for him.”
“Oh! yes, I dare say that is true enough—at least, it sounds so,” said Lilias; “but in some way or other it isn’t true, though I can’t explain it, and can’t argue about it. Besides, Mary,” she went on, with some hesitation, her pale face flushing crimson as she spoke, “it isn’t as if he had said good-bye for ever. He says distinctly, ‘two years’.”
“Ah! yes, and that is the mean bit of it,” said Mary, indignantly; “he had no right to allude to any future at all. He should leave you absolutely free, if he cannot claim you openly—leave you, I mean, absolutely free for those two years, even if he really expects to be able to return at their end. What right has he to expect you to waste your youth and happiness for him? If you were engaged a separation of two years would be nothing, or if even he had said that at the end of the time he would be free to ask you to marry him.”
“But that would have been binding me unfairly, most people would say,” replied Lilias, softly. “I believe he means to leave me quite free, but that he could not help catching at a straw, as it were, and therefore said that about two years.”