Page:In The Cage (London, Duckworth, 1898).djvu/102

96 'Then you're conscious of how wonderful it is?' she returned.

He jerked his handsome head in literal protest at a doubt. 'Why, that's exactly what I mean by my gratitude for all your trouble. It has been just as if you took a particular interest.' She only looked at him in answer to this, in such sudden, immediate embarrassment, as she was quite aware, that, while she remained silent, he showed he was at a loss to interpret her expression. 'You have—haven't you?—taken a particular interest?'

'Oh, a particular interest!' she quavered out, feeling the whole thing—her immediate embarrassment—get terribly the better of her, and wishing, with a sudden scare, all the more to keep her emotion down. She maintained her fixed smile a moment and turned her eyes over the peopled darkness, unconfused now, because there was something much more confusing. This, with a fatal great rush, was simply the fact that they were thus together. They were near, near, and all that she had imagined of that had only become more true, more dreadful and