Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/172

 speak of that; you'll never again hear a word about it on my lips. It's all darkness.'

'I always knew you were a gentleman,' the girl went on.

'A queer variety, cara mia,' her companion rejoined, not very candidly, as we know the theories he himself had cultivated on this point. 'Of course you had heard poor Pinnie's incurable indiscretions. They used to exasperate me when she was alive, but I forgive her now. It's time I should, when I begin to talk myself. I think I'm breaking up.'

'Oh, it wasn't Miss Pynsent; it was just yourself.'

'Pray, what did I ever say, in those days?'

'It wasn't what you said,' Millicent answered, with refinement. 'I guessed the whole business—except, of course, what she got her time for, and you being taken to that death-bed—that day I came back to the Place. Couldn't you see I was turning it over? And did I ever throw it up at you, whatever high words we might have had? Therefore what I say now is no more than I thought then; it only makes you nicer.'

She was crude, she was common, she even had the vice of unskilful exaggeration, for he himself honestly could not understand how the situation he had described could make him nicer. But when the faculty of affection that was in her rose, as it were, to the surface, it diffused a sense of rest, almost of protection, deepening, at any rate, the luxury of the balmy holiday, the interlude in the grind of the week's work; so that, though neither of them had dined, Hyacinth would have been delighted to sit with her there the whole afternoon. It seemed a pause in something bitter that was happening to him, making it stop awhile or