“What else,” he said—there seemed a sort of sad scorn in the inquiry—“What else is left for me to do?” Perhaps he would have liked to put it more strongly—What else have you left me to do?
“I am very sorry,” said Effie, “I thought——” and then she abandoned this subject altogether. “Do you think Eric will see much change?” she said.
“Eric! Oh, yes; he will see a great deal of change. The country and all look the same to be sure; it is the people who alter. He will see a great deal of change in you, Miss Ogilvie.”
Effie looked up with tears starting in her eyes as if he had given her a sudden blow.
“Oh, Ronald! why do you call me that—am I not Effie—always——” And there came a little sob in her throat, stopping further utterance.
He looked as if he could have cried too, but smiled instead strangely, and said, “When you have—another name, how am I to call you by that? I must try and begin now.”
“But I shall always be Effie, always,” she said.
Ronald did not make any reply. He raised his hands in a momentary protestation, and gave her a look which said more than he had ever said in words. And then they walked on a few steps together in silence, and then stopped and shook hands silently with a mutual impulse, and said to each other “good-bye.”
When Effie got near home, still full of agitation from this strange little opening and closing of she knew not what—some secret page in her own history, inscribed with a record she had known nothing of—she met her stepmother, who was returning very alert and business-like from a walk.
“What have you been saying to Ronald?” said Mrs. Ogilvie, “to make him look so grave? I saw him turn the corner, and I thought he had seen a ghost, poor lad; but afterwards it proved to be only you. You should not be so severe: for he has liked you long, though you knew nothing about it; and it must have been very hard upon him, poor fellow, to find that he had come home just too late, and that you had been snapped up, as a person may say, under his very nose.”