And a sudden painful expression—of moral worry, remorse—passed across the girl's face. Wharton knew that she had often been impatient of late with her father, and incredulous of his complaints. He thought he understood.
"One can often be of more use to a sick person if one is not too well acquainted with what ails them," he said. "Hope and cheerfulness are everything in a case like your father's. He will do well."
"If he does he won't owe any of it—"
She stopped as impulsively as she had begun. "To me," she meant to have said; then had retreated hastily, before her own sense of something unduly intimate and personal. Wharton stood quietly beside her, saying nothing, but receiving and soothing her self-reproach just as surely as though she had put it into words.
"You are crushing your flowers, I think," he said suddenly.
And indeed her roses were dangling against her dress, as if she had forgotten all about them.
She raised them carelessly, but he bent to smell them, and she held them out.
"Summer!" he said, plunging his face into them with a long breath of sensuous enjoyment. "How the year sweeps round in an instant! And all the effect of a little heat and a little money. Will you allow me a philosopher's remark?"
He drew back from her. His quick inquisitive but still respectful eye took in every delightful detail.
"If I don't give you leave, my experience is that you will take it!" she said, half laughing, half resentful, as though she had old aggressions in mind.