“If I be,” he replied with a smile, for her high spirits and gay enthusiasm aroused him from his gloomier thoughts, and began to enkindle brighter hopes in his bosom, “if I be, thou, Theresa, art the enchantress who has done it.”
“Ay! now you are more like yourself; but tell me,” she said, caressingly, “what was it made you sad and dark but now?”
“Only this, dear Theresa, that I am again about to leave you.”
“To leave us—to leave us so soon and so suddenly. Why you have been here but three little weeks, which have passed like so many days, and when you came you said that you would stay with us till autumn. Oh, dear! my father will be so grieved at your going. You do not know, you do not dream how much he loves you, Durzil. He is a different person altogether when you are at home—so much gayer, and more sociable! Oh! wherefore must you leave us so quickly, and after so long an absence, too, as your last? Oh, truly, it is unkind, Durzil.”
“And you, Theresa, shall you be sorry?”
“I will not answer you,” she replied, half petulantly, half tearfully. “It is unkind of you to go, and doubly unkind of you to speak to me thus. What have I done to you now, what have I ever done to you, that you should doubt my being sorry. Are not you the only friend, the only companion I have got in the wide world? Are you not as near and dear to me, as if you were my own brother? Do not I love you as my brother, even as my father loves you as his son? Ah, Durzil! if you are never less loved than you are by poor Theresa Allan, you will ne’er need to complain for lack of loving.”
And she burst into tears as she ended her rapid speech; for she did not comprehend in the least at what he was aiming, and her innocent and artless heart was wounded by what she fancied to be a doubt of her affection.
“And if you feel so deeply the mere temporary absence which my profession forces on me, Theresa, how, think you, should you feel were that absence to be eternal?”
“Eternal!” she exclaimed, turning very pale. “Eternal! What do you mean by eternal?”
“It may well be so, Theresa; and yet it rests with yourself, after all, whether I go or not—and yet be sure of this, if I do go, I go forever.”