“How difficult it must be to remember all the people you know!” she said, with the greatest apparent simplicity; indeed, with a tone of almost awe-struck reverence.
“I simply don’t attempt it,” he replied.
“How—dear me, I hardly know how to say it—how very good and kind of you it is to remember me,” she said.
Mr Norreys glanced at her sharply.
Was she playing him off? For an instant the appalling suggestion all but took his breath away, but it was quickly dismissed. Its utter absurdity was too self-evident; and the expression on her face reassured him. She seemed so innocent as she stood there, her eyes hidden for the moment by their well-fringed lids, for she was looking down. A faint, the very faintest, suspicion of a blush coloured her cheeks, there was a tiny little trembling about the corners of her mouth. But somehow these small evidences of confusion did not irritate him as they had done when he first met her. On the contrary. “Poor little girl,” he said to himself. “I see I must be careful. Still, she will live to get over it, and one cannot be positively brutal.”
For an instant or two he did not speak.
Then: “I never pay compliments, Miss Ford,” he said, “but what I am going to say may sound to you like one. However, I trust you will not dislike it.”
And again he unaccountably hesitated—what was the matter with him? He meant to be kindly encouraging to the girl, but as she stood beside him, looking up with a half-curious, half-deprecating expression in her eyes, he was conscious of his face slightly flushing; the words he wanted refused to come, he felt as if he were bewitched.
“Won’t you tell me what you were going to say?” she said at last. “I should so like to hear it.”
“It’s not worth saying,” he blurted out. “Indeed, though I know what I mean, I cannot express it. You—you are quite different from other girls, Miss Ford. It would be impossible to confuse you with the crowd. That’s about the sum of what I was thinking, though—I meant to express it differently. Certainly, in the way I have said it, no one by any possibility could take it for a compliment.”