ing her own irregularity I found myself
arraigned and explaining. She herself explained, for that matter, with
the loveliest, eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she lay
there, that I was out of the room, and had jumped up to see what had
become of me. 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. Instead of succumbing I sprang again to my feet,
looked at her bed, and took a helpless middle way. "Why did you pull the
curtain over the place to make me think you were still there?"
Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile:
"Because I don't like to frighten you!"
"But if I had, by your idea, gone out--?"
She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turne
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