‘Surely,’ she said, with so friendly a smile, that Heathcote felt himself ridiculously touched. Why this girl should with a smile make him feel disposed to weep, if that were possible to a man of his age, he could not tell. It was too absurd, but perhaps it was because of the strange position in which she herself stood, and the way in which she occupied it, declaring herself happy in her loss, yet speaking with such bated breath of the other loss which she had discovered to be possible, and which, in being possible, had taken all feeling about her fortune away from her. A woman, standing thus alone among all the storms, so young, so brave, so magnanimous, touches a man’s heart in spite of himself. This was how he explained it. As he looked at her, he found it difficult to keep the moisture out of his eyes.
‘I want to speak to you about business,’ he said. ‘Mr. Loseby is not the only instructor in that art. Will you tell me—don’t think I am impertinent: where you intend—where you wish—to live?’
A flush came upon Anne’s face. She thought he wanted possession of his own house, which was so natural. ‘We will not stay to trouble you!’ she cried. Then, overcoming the little impulse of pride, ‘Forgive me, Cousin Heathcote, that was not what you meant, I know. We have not talked of it, we have had no consultation as yet. Except Mount, where I have always lived, one place is the same as another to me.’
But while she said this there was something in Anne’s eyes that contradicted her, and he thought that he could read what it meant. He felt that he knew better than she knew herself, and this gave him zeal in his proposal; though what he wanted was not to further but to hinder the wish which he divined in her heart.
‘If this is the case, why not stay at Mount?’ Heathcote said. ‘Listen to me; it is of no use to me; I am not rich enough to keep it up. This is why I wanted to get rid of it. You love the place and everything about it—whereas it is nothing to me.’
‘Is it so?’ said Anne, with a voice of regret. ‘Mount!—nothing to you?’
‘It was nothing to me, at least till the other day; and to you it is so much. All your associations are connected with it; you were born here, and have all your friends here,’ said Heathcote, unconsciously enlarging upon the claims of the place, as if to press them upon an unwilling hearer. Why should he think she was unwilling to acknowledge her love for her home? And yet Anne felt in her heart that there was divination in what he said.
‘But, Cousin Heathcote, it is yours, not ours. It was our home, but it is no longer so. Don’t you think it would be more hard to have no right to it, and yet stay, than to give it up and go? The happiness of Mount is over,’ she said softly. ‘It is no longer to us the one place in the world.’
‘That is a hard thing to say to me, Anne.’
‘Is it? why so? When you are settled in it, years after this, if you will ask me, I will come to see you, and be quite happy,’ said Anne with a smile; ‘indeed I shall; it is not a mean dislike to see you here. That is the course of nature. We always knew it was to be yours. There is no feeling of wrong, no pain at all in it; but it is no longer ours. Don’t you see the difference? I am sure you see it,’ she said.