'So I have, and it is pretty bad, but I thought a walk would do us both good, and we might as well be miserable together, to tell you the truth,' with an attempt at a laugh. 'I can't stand the house without Aunt Milly, and I thought you were feeling the same.'
'Dear Cardie, how good of you to think of me at all,' returned Olive, gratefully. Her brother's evident sympathy was already healing in its effects. Just now she had felt so lonely, so forlorn, it made her better to feel that he was missing Aunt Milly too.
She looked up at him in her mild affectionate way as he walked beside her. She thought, as she had often thought before, how well the straitly-cut clerical garb became him—its severe simplicity suiting so well the grave young face. How handsome, how noble he must look in Ethel's eyes!
'We are so used to have Aunt Milly thinking for us, that it will be hard to think for ourselves,' she went on presently, when they were walking down by the weir. 'You will have to put up with a great deal from me, and to be very patient, though you are always that now, Cardie.'
'Am I?' he returned, touched by her earnestness. Olive had always been loyal to him, even when he had most neglected her; and he had neglected her somewhat of late, he thought. 'I will tell you what we must do, Livy; we must try to help each other, and to be more to each other than we have been. You see Rex has Polly, but I have no one, not even Aunt Milly now; at least we cannot claim her so much now.'
'You have Ethel, Cardie.'
'Yes, but not in the way I want,' he returned, the sensitive colour flitting over his face. He could never hear or speak her name unmoved; she was far more to him now than she had ever been, when he thought of her less as the youthful goddess he had adored in his boyish days, than as the woman he desired to have as his wife. He no longer cast a glamour of his own devising over her image—faulty as well as lovable he knew her to be; but all the same he craved her for his own.
'Not one man in a hundred, not one in a thousand, would make her happy,' he said more than once to himself; 'but it is because I believe myself to be that man that I persevere. If I did not think this, I would take her at her word and go on my way.'
Now, as he answered Olive, a sadness crossed his face, and she saw it. Might it not be that she could help him even here? He had talked about his trouble to Aunt Milly, she knew. Could she not win him to some, confidence in herself? Here was a beginning of the work Aunt Milly had left her.
'Dear Cardie, I should so like it if you would talk to me sometimes about Ethel,' she said, hesitating, as though fearing how he would like it. 'I know how often it makes you unhappy. I can always see just when it is troubling you, but I never could speak of it before.'