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CHAPTER XX

SEALED LIPS

good news was broken to Claire by her father in the dead of night; she had thus some hours in which to prepare for what she was resolved should be her last conversation with Daintree on the subject of Tom. And she anticipated not only the last, but the riskiest of so many risky interviews. She felt that ineffable relief might prove harder to conceal than intolerable anxiety; and so no sooner were her worse fears dissipated than new fears took their place.

For days and weeks her one absorbing anxiety had been the preservation of poor Tom’s life by hook or crook. Now that at the very last this miracle had been performed, her heart did indeed teem with praise and thanksgiving; but it also sank beneath the burden of a new solicitude, never to let Daintree dream what she had done, never to spoil his ideal of her, but to repay his disinterested generosity by all the unremitting kindness of heart, sympathy of brain, and pith and marrow of faithful friendship in her woman’s power. Claire did not now carry the last aspiration to its logical conclusion; but her gratitude to Daintree was such that it rose in great waves which drowned even the thought of Tom; and of the two men, if her heart was still with her first love, her admiration and gratitude were all for his preserver. Such was her feeling when she espied Daintree in the garden next morning early, and joined him on an impulse, without having decided upon a word to say.

“I think you are the best of men,” was what she heard