“You would, then, if you could?” cry I, breathing short and hard.  “You own it!”

For a moment he hesitates; then—­

“Yes,” he says firmly, “I would!  I did not think at one time that I should ever have lived to say it, but I would.”

“You are at least candid,” I answer, with a sort of smothered sob, turning away.

“Nancy!” he cries, following me, and taking hold of my cold and clammy hands, while what looks—­what, at least, I should have once said looked—­like a great yearning fills his kind and handsome eyes; “we are not very happy, are we? perhaps, child, we never shall be now—­often I think so.  Well, it cannot be helped, I suppose.  We are not the first, and we shall not be the last! (with a deep and bitter sigh).  But indeed, I think, dear, that we are unhappier than we need be.”

I shrug my shoulders with a sort of careless despair.

“Do you think so?  I fancy not.  Some people have their happiness thinly spread over their whole lives, like bread—­and—­scrape!” I say, with a homely bitterness.  “Some people have it in a lump! that is all the difference!  I had mine in a lump—­all crowded into nineteen years that is, nineteen very good years!” I end, sobbing.

He still has hold of my hands.  His face is full of distress; indeed, distress is too weak a word—­of acute and utter pain.

“What makes you talk like this now, to-night?” he asks, earnestly.  “I have been deceiving myself with the hope that you were having one happy evening, as I watched you dancing—­did you see me?  I dare say not —­of course you were not thinking of me.  You looked like the old light-hearted Nancy that lately I have been thinking was gone forever!”

“Did I?” say I, dejectedly, slowly drawing my hands from his, and wiping my wet eyes with my pocket-handkerchief.

“Any one would have said that you were enjoying yourself,” he pursues, eagerly—­“were not you?”

“Yes,” say I, ruefully, “I was very much.”  Then, with a sudden change of tone to that sneering key which so utterly—­so unnaturally misbecomes me—­“And you?”

“I!” He laughs slightly.  “I am a little past the age when one derives any very vivid satisfaction from a ball; and yet,” with a softening of eye and voice, “I liked looking at you too!”

“And it was pleasant in the billiard-room, was not it?” say I, with a stiff and coldly ironical smile—­“so quiet and shady.”

“In the billiard room!”

“Do you mean to say,” cry I, my factitious smile vanishing, and flashing out into honest, open passion, “that you mean to deny that you were there?”

“Deny it!” he echoes, in a tone of the deepest and most displeased astonishment; “of course not!  Why should I?  What would be the object?  And if there were one—­have I ever told you a lie?” with a reproachful accent on the pronouns.  “I was there half an hour, I should think.”