ONE:To-night as he thought over this, when the hour was quiet, and upstairs Alice kept vigil, Norahs presence seemed to haunt the room. She had only been here once, but he could remember with such distinctness the trivial details of that afternoon, that his imagination gave him her again, now standing by the book-shelves, now seated in one of the chairs he had brought in that day, and kept here since. They would be needed again, he hoped, next Sunday, for with the arrival of the Leonardo book he had an adequate excuse for asking her again, and, he hoped, an adequate cause for her acceptance. There it lay on the table still unopened, and in the clinking of the ashes in the grate, and the night-wind that stirred in the bushes outside, he heard with the inward ear the sound of her voice, just a word or two spoken through the wind.
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ONE:"Oh--I--just don't feel as if I could, that's all."Again he waited for some reply, some expression of regret which she undoubtedly owed him, but none came. Then, looking up, while her pencil was busy, he saw that she did not reply because she could not. The reflection of the daffodils trembled violently on her chin, and her lower teeth were fast clenched on her upper lip to stifle the surrender of her mouth. And when he saw that, all his brutality, all the impulse that bade{294} him hurt the thing he loved, drained out of him, and left him hateful to himself.
