to withstand it, I must have gripped my little girl with a spasm that,
wonderfully, she submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright.
Why not break out at her on the spot and have it all over?--
give it to her straight in her lovely little lighted face?
"You see, you see, you KNOW that you do and that you already quite
suspect I believe it; therefore, why not frankly confess it to me,
so that we may at least live with it together and learn perhaps,
in the strangeness of our fate, where we are and what it means?"
This solicitation dropped, alas, as it came: if I could immediately
have succumbed to it I might have spared myself--well, you'll see what.
Instead of succumbing I sprang again to my feet, looked at her bed,
and took a helpless middle way. "Why did you pull the curtain
over the place to make me think you were still there?"

Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile:
"Because I don't like to frighten you!"

"But if I had, by your idea, gone out--?"

She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame
of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate
as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. "Oh, but you know,"
she quite adequately answered, "that you might come back, you dear,
and that you HAVE!" And after a little, when she had got into bed,
I had, for a long time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand,
to prove that I recognized the pertinence of my return.

You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my nights.
I repeatedly sat up till I didn't know when; I selected moments when my
roommate unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns