"Nancy!" he cries, following me, and taking hold of my cold and clammy hands, while what looks—what, at least, I should have once said looked—like a great yearning fills his kind and handsome eyes; "we are not very happy, are we? perhaps, child, we never shall be now—often I think so. Well, it cannot be helped, I suppose. We are not the first, and we shall not be the last! (with a deep and bitter sigh). But indeed, I think, dear, that we are unhappier than we need be."
I shrug my shoulders with a sort of careless despair.
"Do you think so? I fancy not. Some people have their happiness thinly spread over their whole lives, like bread-and-scrape!" I say, with a homely bitterness. "Some people have it in a lump! that is all the difference! I had mine in a lump—all crowded into nineteen years that is, nineteen very good years!" I end, sobbing.
He still has hold of my hands. His face is full of distress; indeed, distress is too weak a word—of acute and utter pain.
"What makes you talk like this now, to-night?" he asks, earnestly. "I have been deceiving myself with the hope that you were having one happy evening, as I watched you dancing—did you see me? I dare say not—of course you were not thinking of me. You looked like the old light-hearted Nancy that lately I have been thinking was gone forever!"
"Did I?" say I, dejectedly, slowly drawing my hands from his, and wiping my wet eyes with my pocket-handkerchief.
"Any one would have said that you were enjoying yourself," he pursues, eagerly—"were not you?"
"Yes," say I, ruefully, "I was very much." Then, with a sudden change of tone to that sneering key which so utterly—so unnaturally misbecomes me—"And you?"
"I!" He laughs slightly. "I am a little past the age when one derives any very vivid satisfaction from a ball; and yet," with a softening of eye and voice, "I liked looking at you too!"
"And it was pleasant in the billiard-room, was not it?" say I, with a stiff and coldly ironical smile—"so quiet and shady."