"There's nothing to forgive, Mr. Considine. I sympa--I agree with--it's all so true! There's nothing like youth in all the world, and--love--but, there now! These are things which middle-aged people have no business with----"
"But surely, Miss Matilda. We--they--the middle-aged--have business with that? If our hearts have remained unwithered by the world--if there should still be a germ of life at the core, though hidden by the rind which time brings for a protection, like the scales on a hyacinth root in a gardener's drawer, do you not think it allowable and even fitting, that when warmth gets at them, and moisture, they may sprout forth worthily, even if out of season, each after its kind? Do you suppose a sound heart can ever grow incapable of love. Miss Matilda? Will love ever die?"
"Ah!" and Matilda looked upward. "My own feeling. So true! So comforting! Love never dies. The poets say so. Beyond the grave are we not assured that still and for ever we shall love? But yet--but yet--I fear sometimes that it shows a grovellingness in myself, that I do not cherish the thought more eagerly--as we grow older should our affections not take a higher flight? I long so for more warmth, and regret my coldness and frivolity; but I feel going to church so little helpful."
"You are lonely. Miss Matilda. Aspiring after unseen goodness is a high and abstract flight. It needs companionship. I, too, know what it means. But a man in the world is little able to withdraw his thoughts from worldliness, and I am alone. With help--a good woman's help--Matilda! May I say it? as I have long felt it?--with yours----"
He took her hand and held it, looking in her face.
She did not seem to hear him at first, her eyes were far away. And then she grew to feel the intentness of his gaze, and drew away her hands to hold before her face, where a blush was rising; for the look spoke more of a human than immortal love, and it confused her.
"We will be friends," she said.
"But friendship will not be enough for me, Matilda. You must be my wife."
Matilda was white now. She leaned back in the sofa, and her head fell forward. It seemed to Considine that she would faint, and he had risen to ring, when she recovered self-control, and looked up in his face.
Being a lady of an earlier generation, when fainting was occasionally practised as a climax to emotion, and brides sometimes wept at the altar on bidding adieu to the associations of their youth, allowance must be made for Matilda by young women of the modern and robuster school, who can ratify an engagement for life with the same outward composure as one for the next valse. The modes of emotional expression and disguise are as much a question of date as the fashions in hair-dressing. Matilda was no more a lackadaisical fool than you are, my good madam; nor are you, I do believe, one whit more hard or heartless than she, whom I take to have been a good and affectionate woman.