Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/462

THE AWKWARD AGE it's I who make it up to you. To mother, you see, there's no one, otherwise, to make it up."

This at first, unmistakably, sounded to him too complicated for acceptance. But his face changed as light dawned. "That puts it then that you will come?"

"I'll come if you'll take me as I am—which is, more than I've ever done before, what I must previously explain to you. But what he means by what you call his remedy is my making you feel better about himself."

The old man gazed at her. "'Your' doing it is too beautiful! And he could really come to you for the purpose of asking you?"

"Oh no," said the girl briskly, "he came simply for the purpose of doing what he had to do. After my letter how could he not come? Then he met most kindly what I said to him for mother and what he quite understood to be all my business with him; so that his appeal to me to plead with you for—well, for his credit—was only thrown in because he had so good a chance."

This speech brought Mr. Longdon abruptly to his feet, but before she could warn him again of the patience she continued to need he had already, as if what she evoked for him left him too stupefied, dropped back into submission. "The man stood there for you to render him a service?—for you to help him and praise him?"

"Ah, but it wasn't to go out of my way, don't you see? He knew you were presently to be here." Her anxiety that he should understand gave her a rare, strained smile. "I mustn't make—as a request from him—too much of it, and I've not a doubt that, rather than you should think any ill of him for wishing me to say a word, he would gladly be left with whatever bad appearance he may actually happen to have." She pulled up on these words as if with a quick sense of their really, by their mere sound, putting her in deeper; and could only give her friend one of the looks that expressed: "If I could 452