"But you'll be joining some other company, I suppose?" He tried to make his voice formal and detached.
"That depends," she said; and she looked at him again in that queer, tremulous, mysterious way that he did not in the least understand.
Her small hands were fluttering so close to his that he could have captured them both in one big palm; but he heroically refrained. He kept saying over and over to himself that it was just Miss Nell's way of being good to a fellow, and that, whatever happened, he must not make her unhappy and sorry--he must not lose his head.
"Quin,"--her voice dropped so low he could scarcely hear it,--"have you ever forgiven me for the way I behaved in New York?"
He was trembling now, and he wondered how much longer he could hold out.
"Do you--do you--still feel about me the way you--you did--that night on the bus?" she whispered.
Quin looked at her as a Christian martyr might have looked at his persecutor.
"I think about you the way I've always thought about you," he said hopelessly--"the way I shall go on thinking about you as long as I live."
"Well," said Eleanor, with a sigh of relief, "I guess that settles it"; and, to his unspeakable amazement, she laid her head on his pillow and her cheek on his.
When he recovered from his shock of subliminal ecstasy, his first thought was of the trouble he was storing up for Eleanor. Even his rapture was dimmed by the prospect of involving her in another love affair that could only meet with bitter opposition of her family.
"We must keep it dark for the present," he urged, holding her close as if he feared she would slip away. "Maybe, when I am well, and have a good position, and all, they won't take it so hard."
Eleanor refused to listen to any such counsel. She wanted to announce their engagement at once, and be married at the earliest possible date. He needed her to take care of him, she declared; and besides, they could make a start on the money that would soon be due her from her father's estate. To this proposition Quin would not listen, and they had a spirited quarrel and reached no agreement.
Eleanor had fallen seriously in love for the first time in her life, and it was a sudden and overwhelming experience. During those anxious days of Quin's illness, when his life had hung in the balance, she had time to realize what he meant to her. Now that he needed skilful nursing and constant care to assure his recovery, she was determined not to be separated from him.
