“Certainly, or I would not have given you permission to walk with me here,” she answered with a sweetness which showed her unostentatious delicacy of character.
“Then, as your friend, I beg of you to repose whatever confidence in me you may think fit, and to be assured that I will never abuse it.”
“Confidences are unnecessary between us,” she responded. “I have to bear my grief alone.”
“Your words sound strange, coming from one whom I had thought so merry and light-hearted,” I said.
“Are you, then, ignorant of the faculty a woman has of concealing her sorrows behind an outward show of gaiety—that a woman always possesses two countenances, the face and the mask?”
“You are scarcely complimentary to your own sex,” I answered with a smile. “Yet that is surely no reason why you should be thus wretched and downhearted.” Her manner puzzled me, for since the commencement of our conversation she had grown strangely melancholy—entirely unlike her own bright self. I tried to obtain from her some clue to the cause of her sadness, but in vain. My short acquaintance with her did not warrant me pressing upon her a subject which was palpably distasteful; nevertheless, it seemed to me more than strange that she should thus acknowledge to me her sorrow at a moment when any other woman would have practised coquetry.
“I can only suffer in silence,” she responded when I asked her to tell me something of the cause of her unhappiness.
“Excuse my depression this evening. I know that to you I must seem a hypochondriac, but I will promise you to wear the mask—if ever we meet again.”
“Why do you speak so vaguely?” I inquired in quick apprehension. “I certainly hope that we shall meet again, many, many times. Your words would make it appear as though such meeting is improbable.”
“I think it is,” she answered simply. “You are very kind to have borne with me like this,” she added, her manner quickly changing; “and if we do meet, I’ll try not to have another fit of melancholy.”