“What do you mean?” she gasped quickly, looking at me with a strange expression in her dark eyes. “I do not repent—I repent nothing!”
I saw that I had made a grave mistake. In my fond and short-sighted enthusiasm I had allowed myself to speak a little too confidentially, whereupon her natural dignity had instantly rebelled. At once I apologised, and in an instant she became appeased.
“I regret extremely that you should have such a weight of anxiety upon your heart,” I said. “If I can do anything to assist you, rely upon me.”
“You are extremely kind,” she answered in a gloomy tone; “but there is nothing—absolutely nothing.”
“I really can’t understand the reason why, with every happiness around you, you should find yourself thus plunged in this despair,” I remarked, puzzled. “Your home life is, I presume, happy enough?”
“Perfectly. I am entirely my own mistress, save in those things which might break through the ordinary conventionalities of life. I must admit to you that I am rather unconventional sometimes.”
I had wondered whether, like so many other girls, she had some imaginary grievance in her home; but now, finding that this was not so, it naturally occurred to me that the cause of her strange desire to live her life over again arose through the action of some faithless lover. How many hundreds of girls with wealth and beauty, perfectly happy in all else, are daily wearing out their lives because of the fickleness of the men to whom they have foolishly given their hearts! The tightly-laced corsets of every eight girls in ten conceals a heart filled by the regrets of a love long past; the men smile airily through the wreaths of their tobacco-smoke, while the women, in those little fits of melancholy which they love to indulge in, sit and reflect in silence upon the might-have-beens. Is there, I wonder, a single one of us, man or woman, who does not remember our first love, the deep immensity of that pair of eyes; the kindly sympathy of that face, which in our immature years we thought our ideal, and thereupon bowed the knee in worship? If such there be, then they are mere unrefined boors without a spark of romance in their nature, or poetry within their soul. Indeed, the regrets arising from a long-forgotten love ofttimes mingle pleasure with sadness, and through one’s whole life form cherished memories of those flushed days of a buoyant youth. To how many of those who read these lines will be recalled vivid recollections of a summer idyll of long ago; a day when, with the dainty or manly object of their affections, they wandered beside the blue sea, or on the banks of the tranquil, willow-lined river, or perhaps hand-in-hand strolled beneath the great old forest trees, where the sunlight glinted and touched the gnarled trunks with grey and gold! To each will come back the sweet recollection of a sunset hour now long, long ago, when they pressed the lips of the one they loved, and thought the rough world as rosy as that summer afterglow. The regret of those days always remains—often only a pleasant memory, but, alas! sometimes a lamentation bordering upon despair, until the end of our days.
“And may I not know something, however little, of the cause of this oppression upon you?” I asked of her, after we had walked some distance in silence. “You tell me that you desire to wipe out the past and commence afresh. The reason of this interests me,” I added.
“I don’t know why you should interest yourself in me,” she murmured. “It is really unnecessary.”
“No, no,” I exclaimed hastily. “Although our acquaintance has been of but brief duration, I am bold enough to believe that you count me among your friends. Is it not so?”