“A very nice programme!” I exclaimed, as she smiled, or tried to smile, at her own powers of arrangement. “But if you please, Miss Fairthorn, what am I to do?”
“You must not ask me,” she said, turning away; “there are so many things for you to do. Soon you will be able to be at work again. And if you don’t like that, you can marry some one with plenty of money, and keep racehorses. I dare say it is a nice life, for those who like it.”
“I cannot make out a word of this,” I answered; “people with money, and racehorses! And going to Glasgow by the train all night! Do try to tell me, dear, what it is all about.”
“It is only natural that I should go to my father, when nobody wants me. I am not blaming any one. You must not imagine that. I have only myself to blame, for believing that I was a great deal more than I was.”
“When nobody wants you! Oh, Kitty, Kitty, I must be gone off my head again; and that is why you want to run away from me. Look at me honestly, and say that it is so. I would rather give you up, dear, and go mad by myself; than marry you, if that has once got into your mind.”
She looked at me with terror, and deep amazement; then fell into my arms, and threw her own around me, and put up her lips as a cure for every evil.
“How can you say such wicked things?” she whispered, as soon as I allowed her sweet lips room. “You can have no idea what I am, if you suppose that I should ask whether you were off your head, or on it, when once I had given all my heart to you. But you must not have anybody else in your head.”
“As if I ever could!”
“Oh, but yes, you might.”
“I should like to know who it could be then. As if there were any one in all the world fit to hold a candle to my own Kitty.”