“I am sorry!” said Roger. “It was for you I did it!”
“For me!” And Nora burst into a violent laugh.
“Why, my dear Nora,” cried the young man with a certain angry vehemence, “don’t I do everything in life for you?”
She became grave again. Then, after much meditation, “Excuse my unfeeling levity,” she said. “You might cut off your nose, Roger, and I should like your face as well.” But this was but half comfort. “Too fat!” Her subtler sense had spoken, and Roger never encountered Mr. Vose for three months after this without wishing to attack him with one of his own cleavers.
He made now an heroic attempt to scale the frowning battlements of the future. He pretended to be making arrangements for a tour in Europe, and for having his house completely remodelled in his absence; noting the while attentively the effect upon Nora of his cunning machinations. But she gave no sign of suspicion that his future, to the uttermost day, could be anything but her future too. One evening, nevertheless, an incident occurred which fatally confounded his calculations,—an evening of perfect mid-spring, full of warm, vague odors, of growing daylight, of the sense of bursting sap and fresh-turned earth. Roger sat on the piazza, looking out on these things with an opera-glass. Nora, who had been strolling in the garden, returned to the house and sat down on the steps of the portico. “Roger,” she said, after a pause, “has it never struck you as very strange that we should be living together in this way?”
Roger’s heart rose to his throat. But he was loath to concede anything, lest he should concede too much. “It is not especially strange,” he said.
“Surely it is strange,” she answered. “What are you? Neither my brother, nor my father, nor my uncle, nor my cousin,—nor even, by law, my guardian.”
“By law! My dear child, what do you know about law?”
“I know that if I should run away and leave you now, you could not force me to return.”
“That’s fine talk! Who told you that?”