“I have noticed, however, one mind” (and here the Professor’s voice took a tender tone)—“one mind, Miss Sharp, whose workings seem to follow my own, one mind in which I can see an interest, veiled, of course, as is seemly, but still plainly discernible to the penetrative eye—an interest in my Great Work, now in process of compilation. My emotional nature has, I fear, been somewhat neglected in the cultivation of my intellectual faculties, but there is still time for its development, I think.”
Miss Sharp, in a gentle, assenting murmur, thought there was.
(“So it has come about at last,” I said to myself; “and very well suited they are, too.”)
“This mind might be of assistance to me in many ways,” continued the Professor. “I could mould it to my own. And I can not let the present happy occasion pass without disclosing to you, my dear Miss Sharp, the state of my feelings. Although youthful, Miss Carew—”
“Iris!” I repeated, under my breath.
“Iris!” ejaculated the governess.
“Yes, Iris, if I may use the gentle name,” said the Professor.
But I would not let him proceed; I felt for that woman down stairs as though she had been a man and a brother, and I was determined to save her from the rest. I threw my book and a great piece of rock over the side of that perfidious old demi-lune, the startled Professor rushed up the stairs, and there I was, innocently waking up, and regretting that the wind had blown the new volume off the parapet. I took that man’s arm, and I walked him home, and I never stopped talking one instant until I had masked the retreat of the governess up stairs to her own room; and then I went back to Hospital Street and told Sara.
“No doubt she is sitting there now, surrounded by her relics, the vicious-looking roots, the shells, the lumps of coquina, the spiny things, and the bone,” said Sara, laughing.
“Don’t laugh, Sara; it is too real. She liked that man.”