I found him looking at me fixedly—at me, you understand, not through me to a subject that absorbed him, but at me myself. It was as if he were seeing me for the first time. No—as if he recognized me at last.
Then the doubts went, and the shame and the loneliness. It made me so utterly happy, that look on his face. I felt my heart beating fast.
He said then, slowly—I can remember the words, the tone and pitch of his voice, the very shaping of his mouth as he said it—
“Do you know—it’s strange—you remind me of her. You are very like her. You are very like Madala Grey.”
The hunger in his voice hurt me. I wanted to put my arms round him and comfort him. I might have done it, for I knew I was still but half real to him. But I sat still—only, with such a sense in my heart of a trust laid upon me, of an inheritance, of a widening and golden future, I said to him—
“Yes. I know.”
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
- Transcriber’s Notes:
- Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
- Typographical errors were silently corrected.
- Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book.