Well, even as it was, I perhaps might help!
"Do you know you've never said a word to me about your school--
I mean the old one; never mentioned it in any way?"
He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same loveliness.
But he clearly gained time; he waited, he called for guidance.
"Haven't I?" It wasn't for ME to help him--it was for
the thing I had met!
Something in his tone and the expression of his face, as I
got this from him, set my heart aching with such a pang as it
had never yet known; so unutterably touching was it to see his
little brain puzzled and his little resources taxed to play,
under the spell laid on him, a part of innocence and consistency.
"No, never--from the hour you came back. You've never
mentioned to me one of your masters, one of your comrades,
nor the least little thing that ever happened to you at school.
Never, little Miles--no, never--have you given me an inkling
of anything that MAY have happened there. Therefore you
can fancy how much I'm in the dark. Until you came out,
that way, this morning, you had, since the first hour I saw you,
scarce even made a reference to anything in your previous life.
You seemed so perfectly to accept the present." It was
extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret precocity
(or whatever I might call the poison of an influence that I
dared but half to phrase) made him, in spite of the faint
breath of his inward trouble, appear as accessible as an
older person--imposed him almost as an intellectual equal.
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