The misery of many years has not hardened my heart, thank God. I was as
awkward and as shy with her, as if I had been a lad in my teens.
"Where is he now?" she asked, giving free expression to her one dominant
interest--the interest in Mr. Blake. "What is he doing? Has he spoken
of me? Is he in good spirits? How does he bear the sight of the house,
after what happened in it last year? When are you going to give him
the laudanum? May I see you pour it out? I am so interested; I am so
excited--I have ten thousand things to say to you, and they all crowd
together so that I don't know what to say first. Do you wonder at the
interest I take in this?"
"No," I said. "I venture to think that I thoroughly understand it."
She was far above the paltry affectation of being confused. She answered
me as she might have answered a brother or a father.
"You have relieved me of indescribable wretchedness; you have given me
a new life. How can I be ungrateful enough to have any concealment
from you? I love him," she said simply, "I have loved him from first to
last--even when I was wronging him in my own thoughts; even when I was
saying the hardest and the cruellest words to him.
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