Page:Watch and Ward (Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878).djvu/200

Rh frankly greeted him. He met her with the best grace at his command, and felt her eyes, as he spoke, scanning the trouble in his aspect. "There is no need of my introducing you to my aunt," she said. "She has lost her hearing, and her only pleasure is to bask in the sun."

She turned and helped this venerable invalid to settle herself on the bench, put a shawl about her, and satisfied her feeble needs with filial solicitude. At the end of ten minutes of commonplace talk, relieved however by certain intelligent glances on either side, Roger found a kind of healing quality in the presence of this agreeable woman. At last these sympathetic eye-beams resolved themselves, on Miss Sands's part, into speech. "You are either very unwell, Mr. Lawrence, or very unhappy."

Roger hesitated an instant, under the empire of that stubborn aversion to complaint which, in his character, was half modesty and half philosophy. But Miss Sands seemed to sit there eying him so like the genius of friendship, that he answered simply, "I am unhappy!"

"I was afraid it would come!" said Miss Sands. "It seemed to me when we met, a year ago, that your spirits were too high for this life. You know you told me something which gives me the right,—I was going to say, to be interested; let me say, at least, to be compassionate."

"I hardly remember what I told you. I only know that I admired you to a degree which may very well have loosened my tongue."

"O, it was about the charms of another you spoke! You told me about the young girl to whom you had devoted yourself."