“The sky was just as blue,” said Lydia, “in all the crevices; though they say that in England we never see the sky.”
“You remember it too?”
“Yes,” she said with a faint little tremor in her voice.
“And soon you will be there again,” he said (as if it were not brutal to remind her of it!), “but I—— where shall I be?” He threw so much pathos into his tone that Lydia, feeling herself on the brink of darkness and desolation, could not quite restrain a little outburst of impatience. He to talk like that, who would have nothing to give up, whose life would always be as beautiful as it was now!
“Where should you be—but where you please!” she said, with a sharp tone of irritation in her voice.
“Where I please?——do you think?—but I must not ask you that,” Lionel said, drawing a long breath. And then he added as if he were breathless and hurried, though in reality there was nothing to hurry him, “Lydia—I want to speak to you before—before——”
“I don’t know what you mean; you can talk to me whenever you please,” cried Lydia, with the daring of anger. She was angry with him, she could scarcely tell why.
He was silent for a minute, looking at her with a curious expression which she did not understand. What did it mean? No doubt Lionel thought that Lydia knew exactly all that was overflowing in him; the eagerness in his eyes, the hesitation in his mind. He thought she looked him through and through, and she thought he looked her through and through. The young man felt as if it could scarcely be necessary for him to say what was in his heart; she must have seen it in every look for months; and she, on her side, felt that her secret, which he was so likely to have divined, must be kept from him at all hazards. Thus they stood for a moment as in a duel, the man sealing his lips by force, considering, with a generosity that cost him much, that to speak now would make the position intolerable for her, and that any formal declaration of his sentiments (which she must know so well before he uttered them!) must be reserved for the very end of the family intercourse in which they had been living; while the woman, who had been far too much interested on her own account ever to discover his meaning fully, doubted still, and guarding herself against a mistake of vanity, had to guard her own secret, which she would not have him divine. They looked at each other thus for a breathless moment; then he spoke.
“I can talk to you whenever I please? but not now; before—if ever—we part.”