“If I had not answered from my room when I heard them, if I had pretended not to hear, if I had only held back, which would have been no sin! Should I have done it? Shouldn’t I have done it?” cried Walter, quite unaware of the absurdity of his appeal.
The girl listened to all this with her head raised to him in an attitude of attention, but in reality with the most divided interest and a mind full of perplexed impatience. What did she care about his doubts--doubts and difficulties which she could not understand--which did not concern her? Her attention even flagged, though her looks did not. She wanted none of this grave talk: it was only the lighter kind of intercourse which she fully understood.
“Then it was you,” she said, seizing the only tangible point in all this outburst, “that I heard thundering past the cottage just before daylight? I couldn’t think what it could be!”
“Did you hear me? I looked up at the windows, but they were all closed and shut up. I wish,” cried the young man, “I had known you were awake, I should not have felt so desolate.”
“Oh!” she cried, with a little toss of her head, “what good could that have done you?” Then, seeing the cloud come over his face again which had lifted for a moment, “And how has it all ended?” she asked.
“Ended?” He looked at her with surprise. He had not even asked himself that question, or realized that there was a question at all. “How could it end but in one way?”
“It is so good of you to tell me,” she resumed, “when I am only a stranger and know nothing; but I hope they won’t succeed in cheating you out of your money.”
“My money? oh, there is nothing about money. Money is not the question.”
“I know,” she said, with a pretty air of confusion--“your property I mean; but they couldn’t really take it from you, could they? Tell me what you will do when you come into your own. I should like to know.”
Walter’s heart stood still for the moment. He felt as if he had suddenly come up against a blank world. Was this all she understood or would take notice of, of the struggle he had gone through? Had she no feeling for his moral difficulties or sympathy; or was it perhaps that she thought that struggle too private to be discussed, and thus rebuked him by turning the conversation aside from that too delicate channel? In the shock of feeling himself misunderstood he paused, bewildered, and seized upon the idea that she understood him too clearly, and checked him with a more exquisite perception of her own. “You think I should not speak of it?” he said. “You think I should not blame--you think--Oh, I understand. A delicate mind would not say a word. But I would not, except to you. It is only to you.”