Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/270

Rh "How should I remember what I said so long back as yesterday?"

"That is hard!—for those who hear may remember for a lifetime. Your words kept me from where you were last night."

"What I say at any time is worth but little thought I fear you think too well of me always," she said, on a sudden vague impulse and the first pang of humility that she had ever allowed to smite the superb vanity that had always enwrapped her.

With a soft grace of action he touched with his lips the hem of her riding skirt.

"No," he said simply, "you might indeed 'daze one to blindness like the noonday sun.' But I am not blind. I see in you many errors, more against yourself than others; I see the discontent which always argues high unsatisfied desire, and the caprice which is merely the offshoot of too long indulgence of all passing fancies; but what matter these?—your nature and the nobility of it lie underneath them in a vein of gold unworked. You have had the language of flattery to nausea: I do not give it you; I say but what I believe."