“Your heart does not blame, do not let your reason blame me for thinking so much of your sympathy.” After a while he went on, his voice still lower and faltering, as if hope faltered—“Constance, you have done so much for me.... You have made my life so much more to me than it was.... Will you do more still? ... Will you let me think that the sympathy, the affection you have so long felt for me, may in time ripen to another feeling which will make us even more to each other than we are now?”
His voice had grown husky and had fallen almost to a whisper at the end. They were standing now, she pale and trembling, tears gathering in her eyes, her fingers clasped together before her.
“Oh, I am to blame for this,” she spoke at last with passion. “But your kindness was more to me than wine to the faint, and I believed—I flattered myself that it was nothing more than Christian kindness, that it never would, never could be more. I might have known—I might have known! Harold, if you knew the pain I suffer, you would try for my sake as well as your own to put this thought from you. The power to feel as you would wish has gone from me—it is dead and can never live again. Ah, why has this trouble come to divide us when our friendship was so sweet—so much to me!”
Every word she had spoken had pierced him; but at the end his spirit suddenly shook off despondency, and he returned eagerly, “Constance, do not say that it will divide us. Nothing can ever change the feelings of deep esteem and affection I have had for you since I first knew you at Eyethorne; nothing can make your sympathy less to me than it has been in the past. Can you not forgive me for the pain I have caused you, and promise that you will not be less my friend than you have been up till now?”
Strangely enough, the very declaration that her power to feel as he wished was dead, and could not live again, which might well have made his case seem hopeless, had served to inspire him with fresh hope; and while begging for a continuance of her friendship he had said to himself, “Once I shilly-shallied, and was too late; now I have spoken too soon; but my time will come, for so long as the heart beats its power to love cannot be dead.”
She could not read his thoughts; his words relieved and made her glad, and she freely gave him her hand in token of continued friendship and intimacy, just about the time when Captain Horton, with no secret hope in his heart, was touching his red moustache to Mary's wash-leather glove.
CHAPTER XLVIII
“A Pebble for your thoughts, Constance,” said Mary, tossing one to her feet. “But I can guess them—for so many sisters is there not one brother?”