“We are really not very new friends,” he said to the governess one day. “I knew you through your poem. We met in the spirit before we met in the flesh.”
“Nobody need be solitary nowadays,” answered Eve, brightly. “I have many such spiritual friends, whom I shall probably never see with my bodily eyes. Don’t you think that one of the joys of eternity will be in finding out what we have done for each other unconsciously? I am often unspeakably grateful for the printed words that have helped me on.”
“Do you find many companions in Mr. Gold’s house?” he asked.
“No,” she said, frankly. “You know what it is to like people, and yet have no affinity with them. The Golds’ life is a perpetual pleasure-hunt. Parents and children join in the chase from morning till night; there is little rest or stillness in the house. I should be scarcely sorry to leave it.”
“Are you thinking of leaving it?” Morgan inquired.
“Not yet. Indeed, I have no other home,” she answered. “I had a hope, last year, that one might be provided for me; but that is over now.”
They were sitting together in the Fosters’ little parlour while this talk went on. It was Sunday afternoon; Mrs. Foster, now steadily making progress towards recovery, was asleep upstairs, and her husband had ventured out to church. The sun was getting low; a yellow light came stealing over the roofs of the opposite houses, and shone full upon Eve’s face. Her last words had been spoken in a sad tone; her eyes looked dreamily out into the narrow street.
She was very far from realizing the interpretation that Morgan had put upon her remark. Nor did she dream of the sudden turmoil that was working within him, as he sat watching her face.
She was not a pretty woman. She had the charms that belong to symmetry of form, and grace of manner and movement. But few of those who were struck at once by Nelly Channell’s beauty would have noticed Eve. They would have failed to see the noble shape of that small head, and the play of light and shade on the careworn young face. Yet as Morgan sat watching her, he was stung by the sharpness of jealous agony. Had some man wooed this girl, and been an accepted lover?
He could not endure the idea that those chance words of hers had conjured up. The grand passion of his life was revealed to him in a moment. He knew what he felt towards Eve, and knew, too, that this was what he ought to have felt towards another. This was love. It was but a poor counterfeit thereof that he had given to Nelly.