“Isn’t it delicious?” she cried. “I do like to see bare trees again! I don’t think it is very pretty when the old leaves hang on through the winter. It gives them such a shabby look. The air up here feels just like England on an April day, doesn’t it? Dear old England! We always grumble at its weather, but there’s something about it that makes us always want to go back.”
“Do you want to go back already?” asked Ronald.
“Oh, no!” she answered quickly. “Not a bit—not now. But you know what I mean—the sort of feeling that it is home.”
And then she suddenly stopped, and the shadow swept over her face. Ronald had learnt to know that face so well that he was able to read it like a book. He knew just what she was thinking. He would like to have put out a hand and taken hers, but he was afraid of startling her. Yet he spoke what he knew would be an answer to her unspoken thought.
“Never mind, Sheila, some day you will have a real home of your own again—a home that will be happier even than the one you have lost.”
She lifted her eyes to his with a glance half startled and wholly sweet. It thrilled him through and through, and words trembled on his lips that he was yet half afraid to utter. If he spoke too soon he might lose all. He hoped—he believed—that he might win her for his own. But she was such a child still. He must have patience. There was time—plenty of time. Little by little he would teach her to understand what she was to him. Before they went back to England he hoped to have won her promise to be his—and go back to make for her that home which in his fancy he was already building.
“You are always so kind to me,” she said softly, “you always understand.”
The slight emphasis upon the pronoun made him ask, smiling—
“And who is it that does not understand?”
“Oh, my aunt—and Effie; they think that their house is home, and can’t understand what I mean. Of course, I am grateful to them. I have been quite happy there often. But it cannot be the same, and they do not seem to understand.”