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Rh he thought—but he could not be sure—that it was because she wished to hide the fact that she was trembling. Hereford for the first time suspected that all along she had not felt the self-possession that she showed—that it was assumed.

"I have sometimes thought," she observed, "that my father understood us both better than we have understood ourselves."

"What do you mean by that?" he cried.

She seemed more interested than before in Max's specimens, and he could not see her face.

"Exactly what I said. My father liked and I know respected you. I know he loved me greatly. So I have thought—sometimes of late—that he may have wished us to be better acquainted with one another and that