"You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours, a good deal more of it than for some time before. I hope," I went on bravely, "that you've been enjoying yourself."
"Oh, yes, I've been ever so far; all round about--miles and miles away. I've never been so free."
He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with him. "Well, do you like it?"
He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words--"Do _you_?"--more discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain. Before I had time to deal with that, however, he continued as if with the sense that this was an impertinence to be softened. "Nothing could be more charming than the way you take it, for of course if we're alone together now it's you that are alone most. But I hope," he threw in, "you don't particularly mind!"
"Having to do with you?" I asked. "My dear child, how can I help minding? Though I've renounced all claim to your company,--you're so beyond me,--I at least greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay on for?"
He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver now, struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. "You stay on just for _that_?"
"Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest I take in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth your while. That needn't surprise you." My voice trembled so that I felt it impossible to suppress the shake. "Don't you remember how I told you, when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that there was nothing in the world I wouldn't do for you?"
"Yes, yes!" He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a tone to master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing out through his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. "Only that, I think, was to get me to do something for _you_!"
"It was partly to get you to do something," I conceded. "But, you know, you didn't do it."
"Oh, yes," he said with the brightest superficial eagerness, "you wanted me to tell you something."
"That's it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know."
"Ah, then, is _that_ what you've stayed over for?"
He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest little quiver of resentful passion; but I can't begin to express the effect upon me of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was as if what I had yearned for had come at last only to astonish me. "Well, yes--I may as well make a clean breast of it. It was precisely for that."