Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/138

THE AWKWARD AGE made her completely grave again. "It will be all for me?'"

"Whatever there may be of it, my dear."

"Oh, I shall get it all out of you," she returned without hesitation. Her mixture of free familiarity and of the vividness of evocation of something, whatever it was, sharply opposed—the little worry of this contradiction, not altogether unpleasant, continued to fill his consciousness more discernibly than anything else. It was really reflected in his quick brown eyes that she alternately drew him on and warned him off, but also that what they were beginning more and more to make out was an emotion of her own trembling there beneath her tension. His glimpse of it widened—his glimpse of it fairly triumphed when, suddenly, after this last declaration, she threw off with quite the same accent, but quite another effect: "I'm glad to be like any one the thought of whom makes you so good! You are good," she continued; "I see already how I shall feel it." She stared at him with tears, the sight of which brought his own straight back, so that thus, for a moment, they sat there together.

"My dear child!" he at last simply murmured. But he laid his hand on her now, and her own immediately met it.

"You'll get used to me," she said with the same gentleness that the response of her touch had tried to express; "and I shall be so careful with you that—well, you'll see!" She broke short off with a quaver, and the next instant she turned—there was some one at the door. Vanderbank, still not quite at his ease, had come back to smile upon them. Detaching herself from Mr. Longdon, she got straight up to meet him. "You were right, Mr. Van. It's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!"