Victoria sighed. "Perhaps he will. Perhaps I'm not so blind as you think. But at least I'll have something first. I've been an old maid so long. I want--I want----" She brushed her eyes with her hand. "It's foolish a woman of my age talking like this--but age doesn't, as it ought, make as much difference."
"But you can have all that," Millie cried. "The Major's a good man and he does care for you, and he'd want to marry you even though you hadn't a penny. I know he seems a little dull, but we can put up with people's dullness if their heart's right. It seems to me just now," she said, staring away across the little sunlit room, "that nothing matters in a man beside his honesty and his good heart. If you can't trust----"
Victoria felt that the girl was trembling. She put her arms closer around her and drew her nearer.
"Millie, darling, what's the matter? Tell me. Aren't you happy? Tell me. I can't bear you to be unhappy. What does it matter what happens to a silly old woman like me? I've only got a few more years to live in any case. But you, so lovely, with all your life in front of you. . . . Tell me, darling----"
Millie shivered. "Never mind about me, Victoria. Things aren't easy. He won't tell me the truth. I could stand anything if only he wouldn't lie to me. I ought to leave him, I suppose--give him up. But I love him--I love him so terribly."
She did, what was so rare with her, what Victoria had never seen her do before, she burst into a passion of tears, sobbing--"I love him--and I oughtn't to--and every day I love him more."
"Oh, my dear--I'm afraid it is a great deal my fault. I should have stopped it before it went so far--but indeed I never knew that it was on until it was over. And I liked him--I see now that I was wrong, but I'm not perhaps very clever about people----"
"No, no," Millie jumped to her feet. "You're not to say a word against him. You're not indeed. It's myself who's to blame for things being as they are. I should have been stronger and forced him to take me to his mother. I despise myself. I who thought I was so strong. But we quarrel, and then I'm sorry, and then we quarrel again."
She smiled, wiping her eyes. "Dear Victoria, I'm not so fine as I thought myself--that's all. You see I've never been in love before. It will come right. It must come right----"