Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/128

 "How can you know me?" she asked out of a vague sense of helplessness. "How can you know anything about me?"

He did not touch her. He only sat there in the darkness, making her feel by a sort of power which was too strong for her, that all he said was terribly the truth.

"I know, I know, all about you, everything. I've watched you. I've understood you, even better than the others. A man whose life has been like mine sees and understands a great deal that others never notice because for him everything depends upon a kind of second sight. It's the one great weapon of the opportunist." There was a silence and he asked, "Can you understand that? It may be hard, because your life has been so different."

"Not so different, as you might think, only perhaps I've made more of a mess of it." And straightening her body, she murmured, "It is foolish of me to let you talk this way."

He interrupted her with a quick burst of almost boyish eagerness. "But you're glad, aren't you? You're glad, all the same, whether you care anything for me or not. You've deserved it for a long time."

She began to cry softly, helplessly, without a sound, the tears running down her cheeks, and she thought, "Now I'm being a supreme fool. I'm pitying myself." But she could not stop.

It appeared that even in the darkness he was aware of her tears, for he chose not to interrupt them. They sat thus for a long time in silence, Olivia conscious with a terrible aching acuteness, of the beauty of the night and finding it all strange and unreal and confused.

"I wanted you to know," he said quietly, "that there was some one near you, some one who worships you, who would give up everything for you." And after a time, "Perhaps we had better go in now. You can go in through the piazza