an advantage acquired (the thrill of which had just been so prodigious)
as on my consciousness that she addressed me with a reproach.
"You naughty: where HAVE you been?"--instead of challenging
her own irregularity I found myself arraigned and explaining.
She herself explained, for that matter, with the loveliest,
eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she lay there,
that I was out of the room, and had jumped up to see what had
become of me. I had dropped, with the joy of her reappearance,
back into my chair--feeling then, and then only, a little faint;
and she had pattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon
my knee, given herself to be held with the flame of the candle full
in the wonderful little face that was still flushed with sleep.
I remember closing my eyes an instant, yieldingly, consciously,
as before the excess of something beautiful that shone out of the blue
of her own. "You were looking for me out of the window?" I said.
"You thought I might be walking in the grounds?"

"Well, you know, I thought someone was"--she never blanched as she
smiled out that at me.

Oh, how I looked at her now! "And did you see anyone?"

"Ah, NO!" she returned, almost with the full privilege
of childish inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long
sweetness in her little drawl of the negative.

At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed
she lied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle
of the three or four possible ways in which I might take this up.
One of these, for a moment, tempted me with such singular intensity that,