"Is it strange?" he continued earnestly, with an unconscious parody on his usually suave and insinuating manner. "You will allow, Miss Hungerford, that you might strike one, at first, as not being exactly in the ordinary line of home missionaries, that is, as not having been trained for the work, exactly; a sort of novitiate, I mean—confound it! You will allow that you might strike one at first, as being deucedly new In that rôle."
After this, I smiled with a faintly malicious sense of satisfaction at Mr. Rollin's confusion, though I felt that I had been cut to the heart.
"And when I spoke about having found out about your past life," he went on, struggling desperately with his lost cause; "I did not mean that there was anything bad, you know; only that you sought pleasant diversions in common with the rest of humanity, and enjoyed the Heaven-born instinct of knowing how to have a good time, and weren't always the ambitious recluse and religious devotee that you choose to be just at present; though I've sometimes wished that I could turn saint so all of a sudden, but I couldn't," added the fisherman, despondently; "if I should go to the ends of the earth in that capacity, nobody'd take any stock in me, whatever; and, after all, what does it amount to?
"This isn't what I meant to say, any of it;" he sighed angrily. "It's just what I meant not to say—confound it! You've done gloriously; you've played the thing through to perfection; you've made an inimitable success of it; but Wallencamp doesn't offer scope wide enough for your powers. I offer you a field hitherto untilled, left to the wandering winds and the birds of the air, extensive enough in its forlorn iniquity, I assure you, to engage your patient and continued efforts. It may prove productive of good results yet, who knows? Is it my fault that I didn't know you sooner?"
I did not mistake the change in Mr. Rollin's tone, nor the meaning in his eyes, but as we stood there by the window, in the full moonlight, I caught a glimpse of another face outside, vanishing up the lane—almost like a ghostly apparition it seemed to me—the handsome pale young face. I guessed instinctively whose it was, and suffered a pang of sharp, unconfessed pain, while the fisherman was murmuring in my ear.
"Don't speak to me again of missions!" I cried with the strong and tragic air of consciously blighted aspirations. "I shall go on no more missions, great or small. It is very true what you have tried so delicately to intimate. I was not fit for the work I undertook to do. I have only made mistakes all the way along. Possibly I have been only 'playing a part.' What does it amount to, indeed! What does it amount to!"
"Heavens!" said Mr. Rollin; "play a part, by all means; never be sincere in anything you do. I never tried it but once, and I've made a desperate mess of it. Can't you understand that what I said was only in the purest sort of self-defence? You weigh my words so nicely. Well, you are considerate enough, God knows, of those dirty brats and ignorant louts—coddling that girl, Rebecca, who is a good-hearted creature enough, but not fit for respectable people to touch their hands to; and associating with such conceited boors as that George Olver, and that grinning clown, Harvey, and that poor fool, Lovell Barlow, and that what-d'ye-call him—that fiddling young devil with the bird-like name——"
Mr. Rollin stopped suddenly.
"You might make allowances for a man in a passion," he said; "instead of dissecting his words in that cold-blooded way."
"I had no notion of dissecting your words," I said, provoked into a desperate honesty; "I believe them, as a whole, to be utterly false."