Joyce was a little bewildered by this effusion. She said, with a faint smile, ‘And yet you don’t know me well. I have been here just five months, and part of that away——’
‘My love, when you understand a person and love a person, as I do you, the time does not count by months.’
‘That is what I feel: and I have nobody—nobody to look to:—you will say my father, Miss Marsham. He is kind, kind—but oh, I have not been brought up with him nor used to open my heart,—and in some things he knows only one language and me another—and besides, if I were to tell him everything, he would say what I was to do, and I would have to obey. And Mrs. Hayward with him, they would settle it all,—and I am not used to it, and I cannot——’
‘No, Joyce, I understand—it is they who have led you into it—you can’t ask advice from them.’
‘They did not lead me into it,’ said Joyce. ‘It was just nature led me into it, and the perversity of things. Will you ever have noticed in your life how things go wrong? Nobody means any harm, and all you do is innocent; and even if you were very prudent and weighed everything beforehand, there would not be one step that you could say afterwards—This was wrong. And yet things all turn wrong, and your heart is broken, and nothing is to blame.’
‘Oh, Joyce, words cannot say how sorry I am! There was one thing perhaps, my dear, a little wrong—for to deceive in any way, even if it seems to do no harm and is with the best motive—the highest motive, to help those you love——’
Joyce sighed softly to herself, no longer asking how Miss Marsham could know, then shook her head. ‘I wish it had been for that motive; but there was no love, no love,—I,’ with a sudden blush, ‘did not know what love meant.’
Miss Marsham looked up with an exclamation of astonishment on her lips, but stopped with her mouth open, wondering. Joyce, whose eyes were cast down, did not see the impulse at all.
‘He had read a great deal—a great deal,’ said the girl. ‘I have never met any one—oh, not here nor anywhere—so well instructed. I thought then that there was nothing so grand as that. He had read a great deal more than I!—he was my—superior in that. It is true, I always knew all the time that I was not—what seemed—— But that might never have come to anything, and besides, I would have thought shame. For I thought that to know the poets, and all that has been written—that was what made a gentleman. Oh, I think shame to say such a thing,—it doesn’t—— how can I say it? It seems there must be something more.’
Miss Marsham remained silent in simple bewilderment. Joyce was now talking her own language, which nobody understood.