“Are you sure you know woman? She is apt to have a curious tenderness for the blackguard who distinguishes her with his most especial brand of villainy. Then she hasn’t learned it—the truth—yet?”
“No. Aunt Mim has been loyal.”
“Well, well she may be, so long as you offer yourself the prize to such a self-denying ordinance. She sees which side her bread’s buttered, no doubt. And how does she account for the little stranger?”
“By adoption. It’s an odd thing, Verender—Verender, it’s a very odd thing, and very pitiful, to see how she—little Nanny—distrusts the child—looks on it sort of askance—almost hates it, I think. I’ve a very difficult part to play.”
I groaned.
“Then why play it? What does it all matter to you? You’ve opened her eyes. Isn’t that enough, without waiting till she’s opened yours?”
“Ah!” he said, obviously not attending to me. “But that isn’t the whole of my difficulty. The truth is, she appears to shrink from me too.”
“You’ll forgive me,” I said grimly. “That’s your first comforting statement.”
“I don’t know how it is,” he continued, in a low voice, self-pondering; “she’s frightened—distressed, before a shadow she can’t define. Sometimes and somehow it seems as if she wants to love me, but can’t—as if she were trying, and vainly, to shape out of a great gloom the obstacle which separates us. And I want to help her; and yet I, too, can’t understand. Shall I ever, I wonder?”
I stared at him. “Isn’t it plain enough? But you have love’s eyes, I suppose.” Then I asked, a little softened, “Does she ever lose herself, trying to piece that broken time?”