ivate secretary, and that I was not to be anxious,
for everything was all right, and she would come in and tell me about it
when she had time; but she has never come, and I don't like to go to her,
because I am afraid of forcing myself on her when I'm not wanted. Once,
when we were children, and I had rushed up after a long separation, and
thrown my arms about her, she said: 'Please don't kiss me unless I ask
you to, Gerty'--and she DID ask me, a minute later; but since then I've
always waited to be asked."

Selden had listened in silence, with the concentrated look which his thin
dark face could assume when he wished to guard it against any involuntary
change of expression. When his cousin ended, he said with a slight smile:
"Since you've learned the wisdom of waiting, I don't see why you urge me
to rush in--" but the troubled appeal of her eyes made him add, as he
rose to take leave: "Still, I'll do what you wish, and not hold you
responsible for my failure."

Selden's avoidance of Miss Bart had not been as unintentional as he had
allowed his cousin to think. At first, indeed, while the memory of their
last hour at Monte Carlo still held the full heat of his indignation, he
had anxiously watched for her return; but she had disappointed him by
lingering in England, and when she finally reappeared it happened that
business had called him to the West, whence he came back only to learn
that she was starting for Alaska with the Gormers. The revelation of this
suddenly-established intimacy effectually chilled his desire to see her.
If, at a moment when her whole life seemed to be breaking up, she could
cheerfully commit its reconstruction to the Gormers, there was no reason
why such accidents should ever strike her as irreparable. Every step she
took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where, once or
twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment; and the recognition of
this fact, when its first pang had been surmounted, produced in him a
sense of negative relief. It was much simpler for him to judge Miss Bart
by her habitual conduct than by the rare deviations from it which had
thrown her so disturbingly in his way; and every act of hers which made
the recurrence of such deviations more unlikely, confirmed the sense of
relief with which he returned to the conventional view of her.

But Gerty Farish's words had sufficed to make him see how little this
view was really his, and how impossible it was for