I had dropped, with the joy of her reappearance,
back into my chair--feeling then, and then only, a little faint;
and she had pattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon
my knee, given herself to be held with the flame of the candle full
in the wonderful little face that was still flushed with sleep.
I remember closing my eyes an instant, yieldingly, consciously,
as before the excess of something beautiful that shone out of the blue
of her own. "You were looking for me out of the window?" I said.
"You thought I might be walking in the grounds?"
"Well, you know, I thought someone was"--she never blanched as she
smiled out that at me.
Oh, how I looked at her now! "And did you see anyone?"
"Ah, NO!" she returned, almost with the full privilege
of childish inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long
sweetness in her little drawl of the negative.
At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed
she lied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle
of the three or four possible ways in which I might take this up.
One of these, for a moment, tempted me with such singular intensity that,
to withstand it, I must have gripped my little girl with a spasm that,
wonderfully, she submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright.
Why not break out at her on the spot and have it all over?--
give it to her straight in her lovely little lighted face?
"You see, you see, you KNOW that you do and that you already quite
suspect I believe it; therefore, why not frankly confess it to me,
so that we may at least live with it together and learn perhaps,
in the strangeness of our fate, where we are and what it means?"
This solicitation dropped, alas, as it came: if I could immediately
have succumbed to it I might have spared myself--well, you'll see what.
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