I suppressed all appearance of surprise as well as I could, and took up the pen again.
“Would you please say,” she went on, “that I am only to be taken on trial, at first? I am not to be engaged for more”—her voice sunk lower and lower, so that I could barely hear the next words—“for more than three months, certain.”
It was not in human nature—perhaps I ought to say it was not in the nature of a man who was in my situation—to refrain from showing some curiosity, on being asked to supplement a letter of recommendation by such a postscript as this.
“Have you some other employment in prospect?” I asked.
“None,” she answered, with her head down, and her eyes avoiding mine.
An unworthy doubt of her—the mean offspring of jealousy—found its way into my mind.
“Have you some absent friend,” I went on, “who is likely to prove a better friend than I am, if you only give him time?”
She lifted her noble head. Her grand, guileless gray eyes rested on me with a look of patient reproach.
“I have not got a friend in the world,” she said. “For God’s sake, ask me no more questions to-night!”
I rose and gave her the letter once more—with the postscript added, in her own words.