A difficult friendship

I'm a 39 year old man, I've been a full time carer for a relative for the past 5 years...it's an incredibly difficult thing to do both physically and emotionally. I'd recently decided that I need to start to make something of my life and applied and was accepted to university. In all my time as a carer I haven't been in a relationship as I just didn't have the time nor inclination; however when I started university this began to change. I met a girl there and we get along very well, initially we were meeting just to collaborate on assignments; but began to meet more often, we've been very open with eachother and have very similar beliefs and a similar background...so I guess this is what made her very attractive to me. Meeting her more and more often my feelings for her grew, so about 4 weeks ago I decided to take a chance and tell her how I felt, I had no idea if she was single but thought I may as well tell her. She took my confession well, but told me that she'd recently split from her boyfriend; she was in a long distance relationship and it just wasn't working; initially I didn't ask why as I'm not the prying type. However in a recent conversation she confessed that the relationship had all but ended a year ago, she also told me some things that contradicted previous events that she had conveyed to me. She's a great girl and I really do care for her, but feel that since I told her this; that she is playing with my feelings...she doesn't contact me as much as prior to my confession and keeps me waiting for a reply for sometimes several days at a time; I'm not sure whether she is keeping me at arms length because she is uncomfortable knowing that I feel the way I do about her. She does work very hard and just may not have the time, but then I believe that if a friend needs help making the time for a phone call or text message shouldn't be that difficult; I keep asking myself am I being too demanding? I've spoken to other people about this length and have told them everything, the consensus seems to be that she is stringing me along because I make her feel good; I really hope that this isn't the case but feel that it is increasingly looking that way. She can be very overly dramatic, recently after meeting for coffee I received an e-mail in which she told me she bumped into some people after she left me...she wouldn't tell me who or what was said, except that when she got home she was crying. Of course being the caring person that I am, I was incredibly worried about her; but couldn't not get any response from her, it took her 2 weeks to tell me that it was a silly off hand comment by one of her classmates that set her off. I want to continue to be a friend to her, but am not happy about the way I'm being treated...I'm not sure whether to just cut off communication with her completely, or just back off and play it cool by not contacting her for a few days.