"Do I care for money? Lottie, it's the first time I have ever been charged with that."
"Because you talk as if you didn't. But you do. Why did you say you would never marry an heiress? The color went right up to the roots of your hair when they talked about it, and you said it would be contemptible: that was the word—contemptible. Then I suppose if you cared for her, and she loved you with all her heart and soul, you would go away and leave her to hate the world and herself and you, just because she happened to have a little money. And you say you don't care about it!"
"Lottie, you don't know what you are talking about." His eyes were fixed on the turf. She had called up a vision in which she had no part. "You don't understand," he began.
"It is you who don't understand," she answered desperately. "You men judge girls—I don't know how you judge them—not by themselves: by their worldly-wise mammas, perhaps. Do you fancy we are always counting what money men have or what we have? It's you who think so much about it. Oh, Percival!" the strong voice softened to sudden tenderness, "do you think I care a straw about what I shall have one day?"
"Good God!" Percival looked up, and for the space of a lightning flash their eyes met. In hers he read enough to show him how blind he had been. In his she read astonishment, horror, repulsion.
Repulsion she read it, but it was not there. To her dying day Lottie will believe that she saw it in his eyes. Did she not feel an icy stab of pain when she recognized it? Never was she more sure of her own existence than she was sure of this. And yet it was not there. She had suddenly roused him from a dream, and he was bewildered, shocked—sorry for his girl-friend, and bitterly remorseful for himself.
Lottie knew that she had made a terrible mistake, and that Percival did not love her. There was a rushing as of water in her ears, a black mist swaying before her eyes. But in a moment all that was over, and she could look round again. The sunlit world glared horribly, as if it understood and pressed round her with a million eyes to mock her burning shame.
"No, I never thought you cared for money," said Percival, trying to seem unconscious of that lightning glance with all its revelations. He had not the restless fingers so many men have, and could sit contentedly without moving a muscle. But now he was plucking nervously at the turf as he spoke.
"What does it matter?" said Lottie. "I shall come to care for it one of these days, I dare say."
He did not answer. What could he say? He was cursing his blind folly. Poor child! Why, she was only a child, after all—a beautiful, headstrong, wilful child, and it was not a year since he met her in the woods with torn frock and tangled hair, her long hands bleeding from bramble-scratches and her lips stained with autumn berries. How fiercely and shyly she looked at him with her shining eyes! He remembered how she stopped abruptly in her talk and answered him in monosyllables, and how, when he left the trio, the clear, boyish voice broke instantly into a flood of happy speech. As he lay there now, staring at the turf, he could see his red-capped vision of Liberty as plainly as if he stood on the woodland walk again with the September leaves above him. He felt a rush of tender, brotherly pity for the poor mistaken child—"brotherly" in default of a better word. Probably a brother would have been more keenly alive to the forward folly of Lottie's conduct. Percival would have liked to hold out his hand to the girl, to close it round hers in a tight grasp of fellowship and sympathy, and convey to her, in some better way than the clumsy utterance of words, that he asked her pardon for the wrong he had unconsciously done her, and besought her to be his friend and comrade for ever. But he could not do anything of the kind: he dared not even look up, lest a glance should scorch her as she quivered in her humiliation. He ended as he began, by cursing the serene certainty that all was so harmless and so perfectly understood, which had blinded his eyes and brought him to this.