"Oh, w-will you?" I stammered; while to myself I said: "He is being kind; don't think it is more—don't dare think it is more!"
Though I couldn't help thinking it was more, I turned to the thought of my Great Scheme as a kind of refuge from a feeling too overwhelming to be faced.
And yet, I don't know, it may have been partly some survival in me of the coquetry I thought I hated; that, too, may have helped to make me catch nervously at a change of subject. So I interrupted with something about: "If you really do want to help me——"
But I found I could not talk coherently while his touch was on my hand. The words I had rehearsed and meant to say—they flew away. I felt my thoughts dissolving, my brain a jelly, my bones turning to water.
With the little remnant of will-power left I drew my hand away. My soul and my body seemed to bleed at the wound of that sundering. For in those few seconds' contact we two seemed to have grown into one. I found I had risen to my feet and gone to sit by the table, with a sense of having left most of myself behind clinging to his hand. I made an immense effort to remember things he had told us about those early struggles of his. And I asked questions about that time—questions that made him stare: "How did you guess? What put that in your head?" I said I imagined it would be like that.
"Well, it was like that."
"And you overcame everything!" I triumphed. "You are the fortunate one of your family."
He laughed a little grim kind of laugh. "The standard of fortune is not very high with us." He looked thoroughly discontented.
"I am afraid," I said, "you are one of the ungrateful people."
What had he to be grateful for? He threw the question at me.