"She thinks as I thought, that it's about Archie's father Evie's so upset?"
"Yes; but perhaps she is about that too a little. I'm horribly upset, Jeff."
This last I took as a hint that the effect of this very startling intelligence on Evie was not the first thing to be considered.
"Yes, yes.... I see...." I murmured.
We were silent, and I felt Kitty's fingers move within my grasp. They pressed mine more closely.
"Don't leave me just yet, Jeff," she begged faintly. She was genuinely prostrated.
"No, no," I said. "Let me think for a minute...."
The next moment my brain was buzzing with thought.
I knew that only some such contact with plain raw actuality as this had been lacking in order to make Evie's transition from girlhood to womanhood complete. No longer now was she the fair young tree standing over its sprinkling of delicate discarded sheaths; this puff of Life's east wind had carried away the last of them. She had heard of these things, and so in a sense knew of them; but that somebody she knew ... that it should have come so near ... yes, poor shocked heart, that finished it. Archie's insupportable vanities had begun her enlightenment; the menace of his father's condition had touched her with the fringe of its shadow; and now this revelation had come upon her.
Mr Merridew's illness, moreover, had a plainly seen peril for me. I knew that if anything happened Archie would immediately have enough money to marry on, and my own labours—all that I had planned and done from the first moment of my loving her to this present hour when I sat in Kitty Windus' back room holding Kitty's hand—would go for nothing. They, Evie and Archie, would probably marry, and I—I knew this in that moment for a certainty—I, from sheer yielding, should find myself married to Kitty Windus the moment I could scrape the money together.