The Argosy — page 381: what you’re looking at

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360 Prudence Hart. her arms and wrapped it round her, as if it had been a martial cloak. The movement almost seemed as if it were made to show her lover how self-contained and independent of him she was. And so he interpreted it, as he watched her askance, with his heart full of honest love for her, and yet torn with a good many conflicting thoughts. Did she not care at all for him? the poor lad was asking himself. She was far more than a match for him—he knew that; but yet he remembered words and looks that she had given to him, he re- membered (they were rarely enough, indeed, out of his thoughts) two or three tender passages that had passed between them, and he could not believe that her indifference was not assumed. He let a minute pass in silence, and then he spoke to her again. ““T don’t know why you come down upon me so this morning,” he said. ‘‘What have I done? Iam sure you ought to be friends with me. If you knew how I felt to you, you would see quickly enough how little /, at any rate, deserved to have you say such things.” 1 ‘And why you less than anybody else? You are like other people, I suppose,” she answered indifferently. “But all people are not alike,” he rechocistianiel “Why, it is absurd to talk like that. Do you think all women are like your- self?” ‘If they had my spirit they would be like me in one ee. oy ” she said. ‘That is, 1n scorning me and all my sex, I suppose?” he suggested after a moment’s silence. ‘““In holding their proper place, and not letting you or any of your sex trample upon them,” she retorted. Upon which Keith said nothing. The implied suggestion that Ze was trampling upon fer struck him as something so wildly wide of the truth, that no ejaculation appeared adequate to express his amaze- ment. ‘hey walked again in silence for another minute or so after this. She puzzled him very much: she troubled him and gave him many pangs. But yet he felt unutterably tender to her, and he longed in- tensely to give some expression to his tenderness. More than once before now he had been very near declaring his love for her, but some lingering sense of prudence, some lingering sense of doubt, had kept him silent. But now the moment had come when it seemed to him that he could not bear to be silent any more. “Well, I ought almost to be afraid, I suppose, to say anything more to you,” he abruptly began, with his heart beating fast, after the pause had lasted for a little w chile: “and I should be, I fancy, if my conscience were not as clear towards you as it iss But you know © pretty well how things are with me, Prudence—I never wanted you or any other woman to knock under to me, but you know I love you GomicbooksrGo