“Yes, sir; very good, sir,” said Halfred, hastily; but I do not know that his doubts were removed. However I consoled myself for my want of confidence in him by thinking that he had now a fair field with Aramatilda.
On the evening of that day when we had despatched Mrs. Martin to the seaside, I returned earlier than usual and sat in my easy-chair ruminating on the joys and drawbacks of platonic friendship. “Yes,” I said to myself, “it is pleasant, it is pure—devilish pure—and it is elevating. But altogether satisfactory? No, to be candid; something begins to be lacking. If I had had the audacity this morning—what would she have said? Despised me? Alas, no doubt! Yet, is there not something delicate, ideal, out of all ordinary experience in our relations? And would I risk the loss of this? Never!”
At this point there came a knock upon the door, and in walked my dear Dick Shafthead.
“Found you at last,” he said. “Well, monsieur, give an account of yourself. What have you been doing—burgling or duelling or what?”
His manner was as cool and unpretentiously friendly as ever; he was the same, yet with a subtle difference I was instantly conscious of. There was I know not what of kindness in his eye, of greater courtesy in his voice. Somehow there seemed a more sympathetic air about him. Slight though it was, this something insensibly drew forth my confidence. Naturally, I should have hesitated to confess my little experiment in Plato and my improbable vocation to such a satirical critic. I could picture the grim smile with which he would listen, the dry comments he would make. But this evening I was emboldened to make a clean breast of it, and, though his smile was certainly sometimes a little more humorous than sympathetic, yet he heard me with a surprising appearance of interest.
“Then she's deuced pretty and embarrassingly proper?” he said, when I had finished the outline of my story.
“Indeed, my friend, she is both.”
“Novel experience?” he suggested.