“I was afraid that I might not see you for a very long time; and I should consider it a great privilege to be allowed to know you better.”
His tone was in the highest degree respectful. She raised her eyebrows, as if she did not understand; but the accent of his voice was so very courteous that she could not even find a cold word with which to answer him.
“Are these your two children?” he asked, with a glance towards Dolf and Christie.
“Yes,” she replied. “Get up, boys, and shake hands with meneer.”
The children approached timidly and put out their little hands. He smiled, looked at them penetratingly with his small, deep-set eyes and drew them to him:
“Am I mistaken, or is the little one very like you?”
“They both resemble their father,” she replied.
It seemed to her she had set a protecting shield around herself, from which the children were excluded, within which she found it impossible to draw them. It troubled her that he was holding them so tight, that he looked at them as he did.
But he released them; and they went back to their little stools, gentle, quiet, well-behaved.
“Yet they both have something of you,” he insisted.