I stopped short in my lumbering explanation.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” she said, looking at me with a little frown above her eyes. “Davy, in the old days there was nothing but absolute honesty between us—no nonsense. I have known many men since you went; naturally, some who attracted me,—one or two, very much—”
“Naturally,” I said, but, to my surprise, with a certain instinctive resentment.
“But no one else to whom I could talk, frankly and openly, as I always did with you. Don’t change that, because”—she hesitated—“because, Davy, you can help me to see clearer in many ways, and—and I shall always be to you the one person to whom you can tell anything. Davy, memories, the real memories, I think, are the things to hold on to in this world.”
Her words went through me like a knife, so near were they to my own fate. It was all that I could do to fight back the telltale moodiness I felt rising in my face, for I knew her eyes were on me.
“I really need to talk to you, Davy,” she said, when I did not answer, and there was such a plaintive note in her voice that, to cover my unease, I held out my hand and said with an appearance of bluffness:
“All right: the old alliance is renewed.”
“Absolute honesty?”
“So help me.”
“Then—you were disappointed when you saw me again?”