--That's so, I guess?"
Constantia, in her agitation, relapsed into her mother's idiom.
I nodded, bending my head still lower over the high chimney-shelf,
still staring down into the fire.
"Then you _know_," she said; "and I _do_ call it rather dull of you,
Roddy--not to say insensate--and unlike you, anyway. . . . When, at
the end, he turned and behaved so finely, nursing this man through
his last illness. . . ."
I tell you, it was lucky that I still kept my face turned sideways,
still staring down on the fire. . . . It took me like a mental
nausea, and all my thought for the moment was to hold steady under
it. I felt my fingers gripping hard on the ledge and holding to it,
as the waves went over my poor brain. Through the surge of them
confusedly I heard her voice pleading: and yet her voice was calm,
well under control. It must have been the waves in my own head that
broke her speech into short sentences.
"You were his friend . . . his best friend . . . mine, too, Roddy.
You took it so well, just now . . . I _do_ want--"
What in the world could I say? How lift and turn my face to her?
How answer? .
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