"Yes—I understand that," she replied, looking at him wonderingly.
"When I said just now that I wanted to ask you to come away with me—out into the big world that you have never seen yet—I meant it. There are great places across the sea—wide lands that are wonderful, cities where the sun always shines. If I asked you to come away with me, and leave all this behind—would you do that?"
"Of course," she replied, still with her eyes fixed upon his. "You would have the right—wouldn't you?"
Her simplicity unnerved him; her innocence was something that seemed to stand between him and her understanding of him. "My dear, you make me almost afraid of you," he said. "Do you trust me so completely?"
She nodded, and laughed confidently. "I can't tell you how much," she said shyly. "Only, ever so long ago, as it seems, when you looked over the wall into my poor garden in Arcadia Street, you made everything so different. I was only tired and lonely and sad after that when you went away. Don't go away from me again, because I could not bear it. I was afraid before that the happiness that father's fortune brought was too great to last; and now this that is greater has been added to it. If you are ever to take that away from me, I would be more glad that you should kill me to-night, so that I might not ever know."
"In this world of surprises, Bessie," he said, "there is yet another surprise for you. I'm not so poor as you thought I was. I only let you believe that I was poor, because it would have seemed a mean thing for me to appear rich when you had nothing—wouldn't it?"
"And are you as rich as father is?"
"There's no actual comparison," he assured her. "But if I'm not very rich myself, at least I have rich friends—people who like me, and know me, and with whom I travel about the world sometimes. Now one of those rich friends of mine has a yacht."
It was still necessary that he should lie to her, in his dread lest she might suspect the real truth; and so this additional lie was added to the heap. Even then she suspected nothing; even then it never occurred to her to link the fact of this man's unsuspected wealth with that other fact of the unexpected wealth of Daniel Meggison.