I seated myself beside you, but made no reply, thinking your allusion to quiet perhaps voiced your own preference.
“It seems needless,” you began, after a slight pause, “to ignore your kindness, even though it was veiled. I never felt so completely in another’s power, and though I tried to—to say something—to strike back—I couldn’t. Did my face so betray me that you knew I needed help?”
“Your face told nothing, it seemed to me.”
“But that makes it positively uncanny. Over and over again you appear to divine my thoughts or moods. Do you?”
“Little more than any one can of a person in whom one is interested enough to notice keenly.”
“Yet no one else does it with me. And several times, when we have caught each other’s eyes, we have—at least I have felt sure that you were laughing with me, though your face was grave.”
“Who was uncannily mind-reading then?”
“An adequate tu quoque,” you said, laughing; then you went on seriously; “Still, to be frank, as now I think we can be, I have never made any pretense that I wasn’t very much interested in you—while you—well—till very lately, I haven’t been able to make up my mind that you did not actually—no, not dislike—for I knew that you—I could not be unconscious of the genuine esteem you have made so evident—yet there has always been, until the last two weeks, an indefinable barrier, of your making, as it appeared to me, and from that I could only infer some—I can give it no name.”
“Were there no natural barriers to a friendship between a struggling writer and Miss Walton?”
“Surely you are above that!” you exclaimed. “You have not let such a distinction—Oh no, for it has not stood in the way of friendship with the Blodgetts.”