“Miss Morion,” he began, “do you remember my saying last night that I should be so glad of the chance of a quiet talk with you? I hope it won’t bore you, if—if I try to make you realise a little how I am placed. I have never minded it, or thought much about it till lately, and now everything seems coming upon me at once. Not that for worlds I—I would be without these—new experiences—I would almost say, whatever the end may be! I have never in my life, I don’t think, felt really alive till now. Never so happy, and yet—the other thing too, so terribly anxious—oh! I can’t express it! I have always been a duffer at putting feelings into words. Most men are, don’t you think so?”
“Perhaps,” Frances replied, forcing herself to speak in an ordinary matter-of-fact tone, as her instinct of dignity demanded; but that was all.
“But I may explain a little to you, may I not?” he went on eagerly. “You see, I am the younger son, and entirely, or as good as entirely, dependent on my mother. And she has been a very kind mother, for I have cost her more than I should have done, and she has never reproached me. Now she wants me to leave the army, and—as she expresses it—‘settle down,’ as my brother Con has done. But, then, think of the huge difference between his position and mine. I couldn’t—I really couldn’t think of marrying for money; indeed, if I was inclined to care for a rich girl I think the fact of her being so would destroy her attraction! I am not hitting at my brother in saying this: he had plenty on his side too to offer, and he did care for Elise. The only way out of it I can see is for me to stay where I am, to stick to my profession. Then, if the worst came to the worst—it’s horribly difficult for me to say it—but if it were against my mother’s wishes, there would still be something to fall back upon. That is to say, if I was fortunate enough to find I might hope. What do you think?”
Frances was silent. She seemed to be reflecting deeply, though no one would have guessed from her quiet manner the internal tumult which his half-disjointed speech had aroused.
“Is there any necessity,” she at last managed to say, “for you to decide anything—as to your plans—just yet? It all seems to me so—so sudden.”
Her voice was low and somewhat tremulous. He glanced with a quick shade of apprehension in his honest blue eyes.
“You don’t mean to say,” he asked anxiously, “that I had better not build upon—what it all hangs on, after all?”
“I—I don’t mean to say anything,” she replied, her tone growing firmer as she went on, “to influence you one way or the other. I—naturally it is rather bewildering—it is difficult for me to take it in—all at once.”
“But you can’t but have known it was coming, that it must come?” he said questioningly. “At least I feel as if you must have known it, as if every one must! I suppose when one is so absorbed by a thing like this, it feels as if it were written on one’s very forehead. Ever since that first afternoon at your house when I was so stupid—you remember?—and thought none of you would ever look at me again—I understand now why I minded so much—ever since then, I see how it has been with me.”
Frances felt strangely touched, and the real feeling which his straightforward words evoked somehow made it easier for her to reply. She even looked up at him with a touch almost of tenderness in her eyes.