“But you say that your conduct has been—not what I thought.”
“Yes, yes, that is so: I have not been such a fool. Cousin Meg, we were great friends in the old days.”
“Not such very great friends—no more than girls and boys are when they are not specially attached to each other.”
He thought that she intended to give him a little prick with one of those thorns which the matured rose still keeps upon its stalk; and he felt the prick, which, being still more mature than she, he ought not to have done.
“I think it was a little more than that,” he said, in a slight tone of pique; “but anyhow—we are cousins.”
“Very distant cousins.”
“Distant cousins,” he cried, impatiently, “are near when there are no nearer between. We are of the same blood, at least. You want to push me away, to make me feel I have nothing to do with it; but that can’t be so long as you are Meg Piercey——”
“Margaret Osborne at your service,” she said, gravely. “Forgive me, Cousin Gerald. It is true, we have had enough of this tilting. I don’t doubt for a moment that you would give me a helping hand if you could; that you wish me well, and especially,” she added, lifting her eyes with a half reproach, half gratitude in them, “the boy—as you call him.”
“What could I call him but the boy?” said Colonel Piercey, with a sort of exasperation. “Yes, I don’t deny it, it was of him I wanted to speak. He is a delightful boy—he is full of faculty and capacity, and one could make anything of him. Let me say quite sincerely what I think. You are not destitute; but you are not rich enough to give him the best of everything in the way of education, as—as—don’t slay me with a flash of lightning—as I could. Now I have said it! If you would trust him to me!”
She had looked, indeed, for a moment as if her eyes could give forth lightning enough to have slain any man standing defenceless before her; but then these eyes softened with hot tears. She kept looking at the man, explaining himself with such difficulty, putting forth his offer of kindness as if it were some dreadful proposition, with a gradual melting of the lines in her face. When he threw a hasty glance at her at the end of his speech, she seemed to him a woman made of fire, shedding light about her in an astonishing transfiguration such as he had never seen before.