Through One Administration

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

"So was I—for a moment," she said; "that was the trouble."

And that was the end of it, though even when he dropped her hand and turned away, he was aware of her slender figure standing in the door-way, and of a faint, inexplicable shadow in the eyes that followed him.

He went back to his quarters bitterly out of humor with himself.

"A nice fellow I am to talk to women!" he said. "I have not lived the life to fit me for it. Military command makes a man authoritative. What right had I to seem to assume control over her? She's not used to that kind of thing, even from those who might be supposed to have the right to do it. Some one ought to have the right—though that has gone out of fashion, too, I suppose." Something like a groan burst from him as he laid his forehead upon his hands, resting his elbows on the table before him. "If a man loved her well enough," he said, "he might do it and never hurt her; but if she loved him perhaps there would be no need of it."

He had passed through many such brief spasms of resentful misery of late, and he was beginning to acknowledge to himself that each one was stronger than the last. He had contended his ground with steady persistence and with stubborn condemnation of his own weakness, but he had lost it, inch by inch, until there were times when he felt his foothold more insecure than he could have believed possible a year ago.

"Why should I think of myself as a man who has lost something?" he was wont to say to himself, bitterly and impatiently. "I had won nothing, and might never have won it. I had what would have been opportunity enough for a quicker temperament. It is nothing but sentiment."

And, even as he said it, there would come back to him some tone of Bertha's voice, some pretty natural turn of her head or figure as she sat or stood in the parlor with her small court around her; and, slight as the memory might be, the sudden leap of his pulses had more power than his argument.

It was these trifles and their habit of haunting him which were harder to combat than all the rest. His life had been so little affected by femininity that hers had a peculiarly persistent influence upon him. He noted in her things he might have seen in scores of other women, but half fancied belonged specially to herself. The sweep and fall of her dress, the perfume she used, the soft ruffles of lace she was given to wearing,—each of her little whims of adornment had its distinct effect, and seemed, in some mysterious way, to have been made her own, and to be shared with no other being. Other women wore flowers; but what flowers had ever haunted him as he had been haunted by the knot of heliotrope and violets he had seen her tuck carelessly into the belt of her dress one day? He had remembered them with a start again and again, and each time they had bloomed and breathed their soft scent afresh.

"It is all sentiment," he persisted. "There would be nothing new in it to—to that fellow Arbuthnot, for instance; but it is new to me, and I can't get rid of it, somehow."

He had heard in his past stories of men who cherished as treasures for a lifetime a ribbon or a flower, and had passed them by in undisturbed composure as incidents belonging only to the realms of wild romance; but he had never in the course of his existence felt anything so keen as the inconsequent thrill which was the result of his drawing suddenly from his pocket one night, on his return to his quarters after a romp with the children, a small, soft, long-wristed glove which it had been Master Jack's pleasure to hide there.