“Oh, what makes you ask?” said the girl, swift waves of colour chasing each other from her white forehead to her slender neck.
“That means, I suppose, that you have. I thought that sigh could not be for nothing.”
“No, indeed,” stammered the girl, “really I haven’t—at least, I suppose—I don’t think——”
“My dear, I am sure there is somebody. You must not think me very prying and inquisitive, but I insist on knowing the particulars.”
Catherine grew indignant.
“You have no right; and besides, there is nothing to tell.”
“Pardon me, I have a right,” said her aunt. “Do you not understand that I have left all my property to you, that you will be a very rich woman, and that I have some interest in knowing on whom the responsibility of the management will devolve? Come, my dear, imagine that I am your mother, and that no one cares more for your happiness than I. Did it happen in Switzerland?”
And so at last, by dint of many questions and suggestions, she drew out Catherine’s little story.
“Well, my dear,” she said, when it was finished, and Catherine’s shoulders were shaking in a storm of sobs on her lap, “I must say that I think you have behaved very foolishly, although I appreciate your motives. You should at least have given him the opportunity of a definite declaration.”
“But I don’t believe that he really cares; it was only a momentary impulse, perhaps, and besides, how could I help him? And Margaret, at any rate, suspected that he cared for someone else.”