“What do you mean?” he returned, with a long steady look that seemed to draw out her words in spite of her resolve not to speak them.
“I mean that things are changed—that you no longer need me, or wish me to live with you.” 275
“I need you more,” he returned, calmly; “perhaps I have never needed you so much. As for living with me, is it your desire to condemn me to an existence of perfect loneliness?—for after Christmas Mattie leaves me. You are mysterious, Grace; you are not your old self.”
“Oh, it is you that are not yourself!” she retorted, in a tone of grief. “Why have you avoided me? why do you withhold your confidence? why do your letters tell me nothing? and then you come and are still silent.”
“What is it that you would have me tell you?” he asked; but this time he did not look her in the face.
“I would know this thing that has come between us and robbed me of your confidence. You are ill at ease; you are unhappy, Archie! You have never kept a trouble from me before: it was always I who shared your hopes and fears.”
“You may still share them. I am not changed, as you imagine Grace. All that I can tell you I will, even if you demand it in that ‘money-or-your-life’ style, as you are doing now,” trying to turn it off with a jest.
“Oh, Archie!”
“Well, what of Archie, now?”
“That you should laugh away my words! you have never done that before.”