Immense silences.
"Of course I won't pretend there haven't been others," Mr. Direck suddenly resumed. "There have. One particularly. But I can assure you I've never felt the depth and height or anything like the sort of Quiet Clear Conviction.... And now I'm just telling you these things, Miss Corner, I don't know whether it will interest you if I tell you that you're really and truly the very first love I ever had as well as my last. I've had sent over—I got it only yesterday—this lil' photograph of a miniature portrait of one of my ancestor's relations—a Corner just as you are. It's here...."
He had considerable difficulties with his pockets and papers. Cecily, mute and flushed and inconvenienced by a preposterous and unaccountable impulse to weep, took the picture he handed her.
"When I was a lil' fellow of fifteen," said Mr. Direck in the tone of one producing a melancholy but conclusive piece of evidence, "I worshipped that miniature. It seemed to me—the loveliest person.... And—it's just you...."
He too was preposterously moved.
It seemed a long time before Cecily had anything to say, and then what she had to say she said in a softened, indistinct voice. "You're very kind," she said, and kept hold of the little photograph.
They had halted for the photograph. Now they walked on again.
"I thought I'd like to tell you," said Mr. Direck and became tremendously silent.
Cecily found him incredibly difficult to answer. She tried to make herself light and offhand, and to be very frank with him.
"Of course," she said, "I knew—I felt somehow—you meant to say something of this sort to me—when you asked me to come with you——"