The two riders had something of the same
sensation, as though the leafless woods and the laurel thickets, the
warm, moist air and the low clouds, were a protection and a soft
shelter. Somewhat to Carrington's surprise, he found that it was
pleasant to have Sybil's company. He felt towards her as to a
sister--a favourite sister.
She at once attacked him for abandoning her and breaking his
treaty so lately made, and he tried to gain her sympathy by saying
that if she knew how much he was troubled, she would forgive
him. Then when Sybil asked whether he really must go and leave
her without any friend whom she could speak to, his feelings got
the better of him: he could not resist the temptation to confide all
his troubles in her, since there was no one else in whom he could
confide. He told her plainly that he was in love with her sister.
"You say that love is nonsense, Miss Ross. I tell you it is no such
thing.
For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about
the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on
one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any
one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength. It is
a disease to be borne with patience, like any other nervous
complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants. My trip to
Mexico will be good for it, but that is not the reason why I must
go."
Then he told her all his private circumstances; the ruin which the
war had brought on him and his family; how, of his two brothers,
one had survived the war only to die at home, a mere wreck of
disease, privation, and wounds; the other had been shot by his side,
and bled slowly to death in his arms during the awful carnage in
the Wilderness; how his mother and two sisters were struggling for
a bare subsistence on a wretched Virginian farm, and how all his
exertions barely kept them from beggary.
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