“Are you, Nancy?”

“If you are, I am,” I reply, with a half-smothered sob.

He makes no rejoinder, and we begin again to walk along homeward, but slowly this time.

“We have made a mistake, perhaps,” he says, presently, still speaking with the same slow and ruminating sadness in his tone.  “The inscrutable God alone knows why He permits his creatures to mar all their seventy years by one short false step—­yes—­a mistake!”

(Ah me! all me!  I always mistrusted those laurestines!  They sent me back my brother churlish and embittered, but oh! that in my steadfast Roger they should have worked such a sudden deadly change!)

“Is it more a mistake,” I cry, bursting out into irrepressible anger, “than it was two hours ago, when I left you at that gate?  You did not seem to think it a mistake then—­at least you hid it very well, if you did”—­(then going on quickly, seeing that he is about to interrupt me)—­ “have you been comparing notes, pray?  Has she found it a mistake, too?”

“Yes, that she has!  Poor soul!  God help her!” he answers, compassionately.

Something in the pity of his tone jars frightfully on my strung nerves.

“If God has to help all the poor souls who have made mistakes, He will have his hands full!” I retort, bitterly.

Another silence.  We are drawing near the pleasure-grounds—­the great rhododendron belt that shelters the shrubbery from the east wind.

“Nancy,” says Roger, again stopping, and facing me too.  This time he does not put his hands on my shoulders; the melancholy is still in his eyes, but there is no longer any harshness.  They repossess their natural kindly benignity.  “Though it is perhaps impossible that there should be between us that passionate love that there might be between people that are nearer each other in age—­more fitly mated—­yet there is no reason why we should not like each other very heartily, is there, dear? why there should not be between us absolute confidence, perfect frankness—­ that is the great thing, is not it?”

He is looking with such intense wistfulness at me, that I turn away.  Why should not there be passionate love between us?  Who is there but himself to hinder it?  So I make no answer.

“I dare say,” he says, taking my right hand, and holding it with a cool and kindly clasp, “that you think it difficult—­next door to impossible —­for two people, one at the outset, one almost on the confines of life, to enter very understandingly into each other’s interests!  No doubt the thought that I—­being so much ahead of you in years”—­(sighing again heavily)—­“cannot see with your eyes, or look at things from your stand-point—­would make it harder for you to come to me in your troubles; but indeed, dear, if you believe me, I will try, and, as we are to spend our lives together, I think it would be better, would not it?”