“Don’t you see,” she said, “how very difficult it is, how wrong it would be, for me to risk misleading you? I must think it over; besides the personal questions, there is the fear, the reluctance, to risk disturbing your happy relations with your mother. Indeed, they would be more than risked—she would not like it.”
His face fell.
“To some extent I am afraid you are right,” he answered. “But two people, if I may dare think of it as concerning two, are more than one, and that one not a principal in the matter. Little as you have said, Miss Morion, I thank you for that little—more even than if you had said more—for I trust your every word. The question of returning to India,” he went on, “seems to me almost decided, and for myself I don’t mind. But I have always shrunk from it for—for a wife. There is so much that goes against the grain for a girl—a woman—of refinement and all that sort of thing.”
“But,” said Frances, more timidly than she had yet spoken, “if two people really care for each other, must not that make all the difference in the world?”
Though scarcely had the words passed her lips before she regretted them; she would indeed have given worlds to recall them. Had she any right to say as much? Was it not distinctly wrong to do so, uncertain of herself and of the possibilities of her own feelings as she was? A sort of cold misgiving seemed to creep over her, which in her peculiar inexperience she was unable to explain. Was this what all girls felt or went through, she asked herself, on first actual realisation of a man’s devotion? She was gratified, touched; but was that enough? Were her motives entirely pure as regarded him—what he deserved?—or was she influenced by secondary ones, laudable enough in themselves, but to a woman of her character no longer so if allowed to interfere with the plan of the one great question—could she love him?
All this surged through her mind far more quickly than it takes to tell it. She looked up with the intention of some attempt at modifying her last speech, but what she saw in Horace’s face told her it was too late. It was illumined with pleasure.
“Of course,” he replied, “that is everything—everything. Thank you a thousand times, Miss Morion; it is more by far than I was daring to hope for at present.”
Something, an impalpable something, struck her in his words: was it his still addressing her by her formal name? All things considered, this seemed scarcely natural, scarcely consistent. A quick terror seized her that her inferred encouragement, grateful as he was for it, might have seemed premature!
“Don’t put more into my words than I meant,” she forced herself to say; “remember it was an ‘if.’”
But the radiance did not fade from his face.