“Always when I come,” he said. “Just once, because I am here, listen to me, Hester. It won’t take very long. I think you use me very ill. You know I come here for you, and you will never let me see you. And now when I find you by chance, you insist that you have something to do. Leave it till tomorrow. Perhaps after tomorrow,” said Harry, in a lugubrious voice, “I may not be coming any more.”
“Is anything to happen tomorrow?” said Hester, betrayed by his seeming gravity.
Then Harry cheered up again, and became more at his ease.
“Not,” he said, “if something should happen tonight. That’s what I wish—that something should happen now. Sit down, please, and listen. Don’t you know, Hester—they say women always know—that I’ve been in love with you ever so long?”
“No, I don’t know anything about it,” said Hester, though a sudden flush came over her face.
She had seated herself on the sofa in a kind of desperation, fearing that he meant to place himself beside her. And such had been Harry’s intention; but some dim sense of fitness moved him to depart from this portion of his programme. He stood before her instead, looking down upon her, feeling now that he had it all in his own hands.
“It is true, though. What do you suppose I have been coming here for every night? I think I’ve been in love with you ever since I first saw you—when you were only a child. Now I’m alone since my sister is married, and quite free to choose where I like.” He made a pause, but Hester did not say anything. She sat drawing patterns upon the carpet with her foot, listening—because she could not help it. She who was so full of eagerness and life, it seemed to Harry as if every line of her figure expressed the listlessness of a subject that wearied her. Now this was more than a fellow could stand, although even now he felt that it drew him on.
“By Jove!” he cried, “one would think you were getting offers every day of your life.”
She looked up at him with a brightening countenance.
“No,” she said. “If this is an offer, Cousin Harry, it is the first I have ever had.”
“And you think no more of it than that!” he cried, with most natural feeling, flinging himself down in a low wickerwork chair at her feet, so that he made it shake and tremble. This restored Hester once more to herself. She began to be amused, which, in the dull life she was leading, told for so much.
“How should I take it? I don’t know, indeed, for I never was in the circumstances before. It is true I have read about it in books,” said Hester, considering. “A girl in a novel would say that it was a great honour you had done her, Cousin Harry,” for he showed signs of natural impatience, jumping up and pacing noisily about the room. “Don’t you see it is very difficult. You make a statement to me about your own state of mind, and then you look as if you expected something from me; but what am I to say? I am not in love with you—or anybody,” Hester added quietly, as if by an afterthought.
He was coming towards her, with his lips apart ready to speak; but this quiet little additional word seemed to stop in a moment what he was going to say. He did not quite know how, nor did she know, whether she meant anything by it; but it had an immediate effect. He gave a gasp as if those arrested words almost choked him, then said, “Nor anybody?” suddenly. It had seemed certain to him before that: she never could have seen anyone, and she had informed him that this was her first “offer”; nevertheless he took these words—having them thrown at him, as it were, in a surprise—as a great concession. He drew a long breath, and said—
“Then, Hester, there is the more chance for me.”
Thus in a moment their relative positions were changed. Harry had begun by feeling that he had a great deal to bestow—many things which no girl in her senses could neglect or reject. But in a moment he had been reduced to what in chivalry should be a lover’s only standing-ground, the right of telling his love with or without response, waiting absolutely upon his lady’s pleasure, hoping for her bounty—no more. He was so carried away by this new impulse that he did not understand himself, or the change worked in him; but with a gasp as for breath, turned from the nineteenth-century version of lovemaking to the primitive one, not knowing what he did.
“I don’t know,” said Hester. “Perhaps; I cannot tell. I don’t know anything about it; and, if I must tell you the truth, Cousin Harry, I don’t wish to know. It seems to me that all that is silly between you and me. You can come here as often as you like: my mother is always glad to see you. We are all very good friends. What advantage do you think there would be in turning everything upside down—in making a great fuss and disturbance and changing all our relations? I cannot see what object there is in it. I think we are much better to stay as we are.”
“But I don’t think so,” said Harry stoutly. “If you’re going to argue about it, I never was good at that sort of thing, and you might easily beat me. But I don’t think so. I don’t care about being good friends. I want you to belong to me, to live with me, you and your mother too. Why! we might go on as we are doing for a hundred years, and we never could be of any use to each other—”
Here Hester stopped him with raised hand and gesture. “Oh, yes, a great
