“Will you listen to me,” he said, bending a little toward me and speaking in a quick, low voice, “I did say what you have a right to resent; but I said it in a moment when I was not master of my words.  I had just heard something that made me doubt my senses:  and my only thought was how to save myself, and not to show how I was staggered by it.  I am a proud man, and it is hard to tell you this—­but I cannot bear this coldness from you—­and I ask you to forgive me”

His eyes, his voice, had all their unconquerable influence upon me.  I bent over Richard’s poor flowers, and pulled them to pieces while I tried to speak.  There was a silence, during which he must have heard the loud beating of my heart, I think:  at last he spoke again in a lower voice, “Will you not be kind, and say that we are friends once more?”

I said something that was inaudible to him, and he stooped a little nearer me to catch it.  I made a great effort and commanded my voice and said, very low? but with an attempt to speak lightly, “You have not made it any better, but I will forget it.”

He caught my hand for one instant, then let it go as suddenly.  And neither of us could speak.

There is no position more false and trying than a woman’s, when she is told in this way that a man loves her, and yet has not been told it; when she must seem not to see what she would be an idiot not to see; when he can say what he pleases and she must seem to hear only so much.  I did no better and no worse than most women of my years would have done.  At last the silence (which did not seem a silence to me, it was so full of new and conflicting thoughts,) was broken by the recommencement of the music in the other room.  He had taken a book in his hands and was turning over its pages restlessly.

“Why have you not danced?” he said at last, in a voice that still showed agitation.

“I have not danced because I can’t, because I never have been taught.”

“You? not taught? it seems incredible.  But let me teach you.  Will you?  Teach you! you would dance by intention.  And would love it—­madly—­as I did years ago.  Come with me, will you?”

“Oh, no,” I said, half frightened, shrinking back, “I am not going to dance—­ever.”

“Perhaps that is as well,” he said in a low tone, meeting my eye for an instant, and telling me by that sudden brilliant gleam from his, that then he would be spared the pain of ever seeing me dancing with another.

“But let me teach you something,” he said after a moment.  “Let me teach you German—­will you?” He sank down in a chair by the table, and leaning forward, repeated his question eagerly.

“Oh, yes, I should like it so much—­if—.”

“If—­if what?  If it could be arranged without frightening and embarrassing you, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if you are not more afraid of being frightened and embarrassed than of any other earthly trial.  There are worse things that come to us, Miss d’Estree.  But I will arrange about the German, and you need have no terror.  How will I arrange?  No matter—­when Mrs. Hollenbeck asks you to join a class in German, you will join it, will you not?”