Page:Neith Boyce--The bond.djvu/425

Rh behind now. I'm sure by next year we shall have caught up. If necessary I'll borrow from Aunt Sophy. She'd be glad to lend me anything."

"Borrow? I can't see that that would make us better off."

"Only for the time. We've been extravagant this last year, and then my—my illness"

Teresa's head drooped, and her eyes closed sadly. Basil looked at her for a moment, then came up and touched her hair.

"Poor Teresa," he said softly.

That note of tenderness had been missing these many weeks. Teresa sat motionless; two tears rolled from under her closed eyelids.

"Well … what else was it, besides money?" she asked, after a moment.

"Oh, I have been thinking about you—and how we are bound together."

"Yes."

"And yet you did a great deal to break that down. You made me want to break it. You've made me suffer—and I can't love you as I did before."

"Can't you," [sic]

"No, you don't belong to me as you did. You were such a beautiful thing to me. I care for you more in one way than I did, now that I realise all the strength of your hold on me. I couldn't work to-day because you weren't in the house. I want you with me, all the more perhaps because