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just quitted. ‘Do you mean you came simply to look at me?
That’s better for you perhaps than for me.’
‘I wished to hear the sound of your voice,’ he said.
‘You’ve heard it, and you see it says nothing very sweet.’
‘It gives me pleasure, all the same.’ And with this he got
up.
She had felt pain and displeasure on receiving early that
day the news he was in Florence and by her leave would
come within an hour to see her. She had been vexed and
distressed, though she had sent back word by his messenger
that he might come when he would. She had not been bet-
ter pleased when she saw him; his being there at all was so
full of heavy implications. It implied things she could never
assent to-rights, reproaches, remonstrance, rebuke, the ex-
pectation of making her change her purpose. These things,
however, if implied, had not been expressed; and now our
young lady, strangely enough, began to resent her visitor’s
remarkable self-control. There was a dumb misery about
him that irritated her; there was a manly staying of his hand
that made her heart beat faster. She felt her agitation ris-
ing, and she said to herself that she was angry in the way a
woman is angry when she has been in the wrong. She was
not in the wrong; she had fortunately not that bitterness to
swallow; but, all the same, she wished he would denounce
her a little. She had wished his visit would be short; it had no
purpose, no propriety; yet now that he seemed to be turn-
ing away she felt a sudden horror of his leaving her without
uttering a word that would give her an opportunity to de-
fend herself more than she had done in writing to him a

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