“No,” he said; “what must be, must. I’ll love you!”
There was a curious, defiant sadness in his tone, but it was gone directly. I could only stare at him in wonder.
“You’re to be my house-fellow and chum,” he said. “No, don’t protest; I’ve settled it. We’ll arrange the rest with Cringle.”
And so I slept in a bed in London for the first time.
But the noise of a water wheel roared in my ears all night.
CHAPTER XV.
SWEET, POOR DOLLY.
“Trender,” said Duke, unexpectedly after a silence the next morning, as we loitered over breakfast, “pay attention to one thing. I don’t ask you for a fragment of your past history and don’t want to hear anything about it. You’ll say, as yet you haven’t offered me your confidence, and quite right, too, on the top of our short acquaintance. But don’t ever offer it to me, you understand? Our friendship starts from sunrise, morning by morning, and lasts the day. I don’t mean it shall be the less true for that; I have a theory, that’s all.”
“What is it, Straw?”
“Sufficient for the day, it’s called. Providence has elected to give us, not one existence, but so many or few, each linked to the next by an insensibility and intercalated as a whole between appropriate limits.”
“I don’t quite understand.”