“I am no longer a brother and must be polite.”
“Do you call that politeness?”
“Politeness or—policy.”
“Well, whichever it is, it’s not a bit nice. Not a bit like—Bob.”
“You forget. Bob is my own name, as well as my friend Garrett’s.”
“How formal you are. What is the matter? You can’t be annoyed about anything Father Ambrose has said to you? Nor about his having helped us? What is it?”
“I didn’t even know I was formal.”
She turned away to the priest’s table and sat in his chair turning over the books on the desk. I sat facing her as I had faced the priest. Once she sighed, and once shrugged her shoulders, and twice glanced across at me in perplexity.
She was very pretty; very bewitching; more pretty and bewitching than ever, in my eyes; but I was conscious of a new restraint—a something like a barrier between us which had not been there before. I couldn’t speak with the old freedom; in fact, I could think of nothing to say.
“Father Ambrose tells me you are going away,” she said at length, her fingers still busy with the books.