In the distress that she caused me I forgot the years that had passed, and the change they had made in our position towards one another. I moved my chair close to her, and picked up her handkerchief from the carpet, and drew her hands from her face gently. “Don’t cry, my love,” I said, and dried the tears that were gathering in her eyes with my own hand, as if she had been the little Laura Fairlie of ten long years ago.
It was the best way I could have taken to compose her. She laid her head on my shoulder, and smiled faintly through her tears.
“I am very sorry for forgetting myself,” she said artlessly. “I have not been well—I have felt sadly weak and nervous lately, and I often cry without reason when I am alone. I am better now—I can answer you as I ought, Mr. Gilmore, I can indeed.”
“No, no, my dear,” I replied, “we will consider the subject as done with for the present. You have said enough to sanction my taking the best possible care of your interests, and we can settle details at another opportunity. Let us have done with business now, and talk of something else.”
I led her at once into speaking on other topics. In ten minutes’ time she was in better spirits, and I rose to take my leave.
“Come here again,” she said earnestly. “I will try to be worthier of your kind feeling for me and for my interests if you will only come again.”
Still clinging to the past—that past which I represented to her, in my way, as Miss Halcombe did in hers! It troubled me sorely to see her looking back, at the beginning of her career, just as I look back at the end of mine.
“If I do come again, I hope I shall find you better,” I said; “better and happier. God bless you, my dear!”