“Gervase! not one of them could take your place. Not one of them could do what you were wanted to do.”
“That is just what my father said.” He gave vent to a short laugh, embarrassed and uneasy. “You ought to back me up, or what is to become of me? This makes it all the harder to tell you—of the future, as you said.”
“Yes, Gervase.” She gave the hand that held hers a little pressure, a touch that meant much.
“Well,” he cried, with a burst of wounded feeling, anxiety, doubt, disappointment, all in one, “that is just what gives it its sting. ‘You cannot marry’ he tells me, ‘on your boy’s allowance:’ which means that I am to have nothing more: that I have to offer you—nothing! not the kind of life that you have been living—nor luxury nor beauty, nor—anything we have thought of. But only a poor man’s pittance—a sort of starvation—a—nothing! nothing! and after all our dreams.”
She gave his hand a little pressure again. “Don’t be extravagant,” she said. “Do you think I would hesitate—if——”
“If what?”
“If there was any need for it?” she said.
And then again there was a pause. This time it was he who averted his head, gazing straight before him into the vacant air, while she looked at him anxiously. After a while he replied in a cold constrained tone,—“The need—exists in my own mind. I am very unfortunate not to be able to make you understand it. That takes all support from me. But it does not change me. There is need—in my eyes.” He paused again. “I have made a very bitter discovery already to-night, that my father is guided by other sentiments than love and generosity to his only child. That he wants a recompense—his pound of flesh.”
“Oh, Gervase, don’t talk of it so!—is it not reasonable—his only child?”
“Yes, his only child—that is what I thought. I believed he would respect the scruples he has himself had me trained to. I never thought it was an affair of bargaining between us. And now he has made it so, and, Madeline, you——”