Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/168

THE AWKWARD AGE I ache in every limb with the certainty of my dreadful difference. It isn't as if I didn't know it, don't you see? There it is, as a matter of course: I've helplessly, but finally and completely, accepted it. Won't that help you?" she so ingeniously pleaded. "It isn't as if I tormented you with any recall of her whatever. I can quite see how awful it would be for you if, with the effect I produce on you, I did have her lovely eyes or her distinguished nose or the shape of her forehead or the color of her hair. Strange as it is in a daughter, I'm disconnected altogether, and don't you think I may be a little saved for you by becoming thus simply out of the question? Of course," she continued, "your real trial is poor Nanda—she's likewise so fearfully out of it, and yet she's so fearfully in it. And she," said Mrs. Brook wonderfully—"she doesn't know!"

A strange faint flush, while she talked, had come into Mr. Longdon's face, and, whatever effect, as she put it, she produced on him, it was clearly not that of causing his attention to wander. She held him at least, for weal or woe; his bright eyes grew brighter and opened into a stare that finally seemed to offer him as submerged in mere wonder. At last, however, he rose to the surface, and he appeared to have lighted, at the bottom of the sea, on the pearl of the particular wisdom he needed. "I dare say there may be something in what you so extraordinarily suggest."

She jumped at it as if in pleasant pain. "In just letting me go—?"

But at this he dropped. "I shall never let you go."

It renewed her fear. "Not just for what I am?"

He rose from his place beside her, but looking away from her and with his color marked. "I shall never let you go," he repeated.

"Oh, you angel!" She sprang up more quickly, and the others were by this time on their feet. "I've done 158