That needn't surprise you."
My voice trembled so that I felt it impossible to suppress the shake.
"Don't you remember how I told you, when I came and sat on your
bed the night of the storm, that there was nothing in the world I
wouldn't do for you?"
"Yes, yes!" He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a tone
to master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing out
through his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting.
"Only that, I think, was to get me to do something for YOU!"
"It was partly to get you to do something," I conceded.
"But, you know, you didn't do it."
"Oh, yes," he said with the brightest superficial eagerness,
"you wanted me to tell you something."
"That's it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know."
"Ah, then, is THAT what you've stayed over for?"
He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest
little quiver of resentful passion; but I can't begin to express
the effect upon me of an implication of surrender even so faint.
It was as if what I had yearned for had come at last only to
astonish me. "Well, yes--I may as well make a clean breast of it.
it was precisely for that."
He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating the
assumption on which my action had been founded; but what he finally said was:
"Do you mean now--here?"
"There couldn't be a better place or time.
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