Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/52

THE IVORY TOWER "He can hardly have thanked you for that!" Davey's competence threw off.

"No, he didn't pretend to, and I had known he wouldn't; he hadn't to tell me how a boy feels in taking such a charge from a girl. But there he was on a small divan, swinging his legs a little and with his head—he had taken his hat off—back against the top of the seat and the queerest look in his flushed face. For a moment he stared hard, and then at least, I said to myself, his tears were coming up. They didn't come, however—he only kept glaring as in fever; from which I presently saw that I had said not a bit the wrong thing, but exactly the very best. 'Oh if I were some good to you!' I went on—and with the sense the next moment, ever so happily, that that was really what I was being. 'She has put it upon me to choose for myself—to think, to decide and to settle it that way for both of us. She has put it all upon me,' he said—'and how can I choose, in such a difficulty,' he asked, 'when she tells me, and when I believe, that she'll do exactly as I say?' 'You mean your mother will marry Mr. Northover or give him up according as you prefer?'—but of course I knew what he meant. It was a joy to me to feel it clear up—with the good I had already done him, at a touch, by making him speak. I saw how this relieved him even when he practically spoke of his question as too frightful for his young intelligence, his young conscience 38