Colonel Kingsward looked at her, helpless, still without a word to say. There was surely a laughing demon in her eyes which saw through and through him and knew the trouble in his mind; but her face was serious, appealing, a little raised towards him, waiting for his words as if her fate hung upon them. The colour rose over his middle-aged countenance to the very hair which was beginning to show traces of white over his high forehead.
“Blame!” he stammered, scarcely knowing what he said, “I hope you don’t think me quite a fool.”
“What,” she cried, picking him up as it were on the end of her lance, holding him out to the scorn—if not of the world, yet of himself. “Do you think so little of a woman, Colonel Kingsward, that you would not take the trouble to find fault with her? Ah! Don’t be so hard! You would not be a fool if you did that—you should find that I would take it with gratitude, accept it, be guided by it. Believe me, I am worthy, if you think me in the wrong, to be told so—I am, indeed I am!”
Were these tears in her fine eyes? She made them look as if they were, and filled him with a compunction and a shame of his own superficial judgment impossible to put into words.
“I—think you wrong!” he said, stammering and faltering. “I would as soon think that—heaven was wrong. I—blame you! Dear Miss Laura, how, how can you imagine such a thing? I should be a miserable idiot indeed if——”
“Come,” she said, “I begin to think you didn’t mean—now that you have called me by my name.”
“I beg you a thousand pardons. I—I—It was a slip of the tongue. It was—from the signature to your letters—which is somehow so like you——”
“Yes,” she said. “It pleases me very much that you should think so—more like me than Lance. Lance! What a name! My mother made a mésalliance. I don’t give up my father, poor dear, though he has saddled me with such a family—but Laura is me, whereas Lance is only—an accident.”
“An accident that may be removed,” he said, involuntarily. It was a thing that might be said to any unmarried woman, a conventional sort of half compliment, which custom would have permitted him to put in even stronger terms—but to her! When he had said it horror seized his soul.
“No,” she said, gently shaking her head. “No. At my age one does not recover from an accident like that; one must bear the scar all one’s days. And you really had nothing to find fault with me about?”