se long years.

Miss Pollingray concluded by asking me what I thought of the story. I
said: 'It is very strange French habits are so different from ours. I
dare say . . . I hope . . . , perhaps . . . indeed, Mr. Pollingray seems
happy now.' Her idea of my wits must be that they are of the schoolgirl
order--a perfect receptacle for indefinite impressions.

'Ah!' said she. 'Gilbert has burnt his heart to ashes by this time.'

I slept with that sentence in my brain. In the morning, I rose and
dressed, dreaming. As I was turning the handle of my door to go down to
breakfast, suddenly I swung round in a fit of tears. It was so piteous to
think that he should have waited by her twenty years in a slow anguish,
his heart burning out, without a reproach or a complaint. I saw him, I
still see him, like a martyr.

'Some people,' Miss Pollingray said, I permitted themselves to think evil
of my brother's assiduous devotion to a married woman. There is not a
spot on his character, or on that of the person whom Gilbert loved.'

I would believe it in the teeth of calumny. I would cling to my, belief
in him if I were drowning.

I consider that those twenty years are just nothing, if he chooses to
have them so. He has lived embalmed in a saintly affection. No wonder he
considers himself still youthful. He is entitled to feel that his future
is before him.

No amount of sponging would get the stains away from my horrid red
eyelids. I slunk into my seat at the breakfast-table, not knowing that
one of the maids had dropped a letter from Charles into my hand, and that
I had opened it and was holding it open. The letter, as I found
afterwards, told me that Charles has received an order from his uncle to
go over to Mr. Pollingray's estate in Dauphiny on business. I am not
sorry that they should have supposed I was silly enough to cry at the
thought of Charles's crossing the Channel. They did imagine it, I know;
for by and by Miss Pollingray whispered: 'Les absents n'auront pas tort,
cette fois, n'est-ce-pas? 'And Mr. Pollingray was cruelly gentle: an air
of 'I would not intrude on such emotions'; and I heightened their
delusions as much as I could: there was no other way of accounting for my
pantomime face. Why should he fancy I suffered so terribly? He talked
with an excited cheerfulness meant to relieve me, of course, but there
was no justification for his deeming me a love-sick kind of woe-begone
ballad girl. It caused him likewise t