She had no inkling of the great test from which he had just come out victorious. And he answered modestly, “Hi think Hi can.”
“But why do you leave in this way?” she asked, a new thought presenting itself. “You are not—not running away, are you?”
“Well, Hi guess you would call hit that. Hi’d a row with Riles, an’ Hi’m goin’.”
There was a silence that lengthened into minutes. The boy shifted from one foot to another, powerless to tear himself away, and yet without an excuse for remaining longer.
“Well, good-bye, Miss Vane,” he said at length.
She started as the words recalled her. “Not yet, Wilfred,” she said. “Not yet, for a little while,” and there was something akin to pleading in her voice. “Wilfred, I believe you are an honest boy. I believe I can trust you. Can I trust you, Wilfred?”
And again he answered modestly, “Hi think you can.”
“Well, I am going to trust you. I am going to tell you a secret, a secret that no one in the world must know but our two selves. And most of all, if you meet him he must not know I told you this. But somewhere in the great West, I believe there is one who is more to me than—than——” She stopped for a term of comparison. “You can’t understand, Wilfred, yet, but some day you will know. You will know what it is to find your life revolving around one great thought, as the earth circles the sun, and to know that that thought springs from one Source, for which you were created, which is the end and purpose of your existence. And for me that Centre has been removed—has been torn out of my plan of life. I may find another Centre, but I can never describe a true circle about it. It will always be an elliptic, an eccentric, drawn and pushed by other forces to which I know I should not respond.”
“Hi ’ardly know hall you mean, Miss Vane, but——”
“I don’t know all I mean myself, least of all what I mean by talking to you in this way, but I must talk to some one. The worst loneliness in the world is to have no one to talk to, no one who can understand you. Talk is putting thoughts into words and draining them out of your stormy brain, as the great thunderclouds, when they become overloaded, find relief in rain, and out of their wild bursts of passion emerges a cloudless sky. But you know who I mean, don’t you?”