‘I know men who would give their heads to stand in your position——’
‘And what would they do in it?’ asked Douglas, pulling ineffectually at the pipe, which had long gone out. ‘Say yourself, for example; you are totally different—you have got your house and your settled income, and you know what is before you.’
‘I can’t discuss it in this way. Do you imagine that I have as much to spend, to use your own argument,’ cried the Curate, ‘as you have here?’
‘It is quite different,’ Douglas said. Then he added, with a sort of dogged determination, ‘I am getting on. I think I am getting the ball at my foot; but to marry at present would be destruction—and to her still more than to me.’
‘Then the short and the long is——’
‘The short and the long is exactly what I have told you. You may tell her yourself, if you please. Whatever love in a cottage may be, love in chambers is impossible. With her fortune we could have married, and it would have helped me on. Without it, such a thing would be madness, ruin to me and to her too.’
Charley rose up, stumbling to his feet. ‘This is all you have got to say?’ he said.
‘Yes, that is all I have got to say; and, to tell the truth, I think it is wonderfully good of me to say it, and not to show you politely to the door; but we are old friends, and you are her old friend——’
‘Good-night, Douglas,’ the Curate said, abruptly. He did not offer his friend his hand, but went out bewildered, stumbling down the stairs and out at the door. This was what he had yielded up all his hopes (but he never had any hopes) for! this was what Anne had selected out of the world. He did not go back to his hotel, but took a long walk round and round the parks in the dismal lamplight, seeing many a dismal scene. It was almost morning when his brother, utterly surprised and alarmed, heard him come in at last.