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had oppressed me a few hours before, watched her closely, gathering handfuls of sand and spilling them over my knee. "Did you ever go to Broadway?" she began again. "I have, yes." "I did, too," she assured me eagerly. "I think it is beautiful. I should like to live there, should not you? Perhaps," hopefully, "you do live there?" "No," I said, still on my guard and uncomfortable, "I don't. Are you planning to live there after you are married?" She shook her head regretfully. "I am afraid not," she said, and her voice dropped a full third and coloured with a most absurd and exquisite sombre quality, as Duse's used to in _La Dame aux Camellias_. "Roger would not want to. He will not want me to walk there very much, either. And that is very strange, because there is where I first saw him. But there are places I shall like quite as well, he says, and he will take me there. Will you come, too?" "I am afraid," I replied drily, "that I might be a little _de trop_, perhaps. Roger might not care for my society under those circumstances." Again she answered my tone rather than my words. "Roger loves you," she said simply. "He used to," I returned--inexcusably. Oh, yes! utterly inexcusably. Again her eyes widened and grew dark, and this time the corners of her mouth curved down pitifully, and I felt a strange heaviness at my heart. "You do not love me, do you, Jerry?" she said, and now her voice dropped a good fifth and thrilled like the plucked string of a violoncello, and my nerves vibrated to it and tingled in my wrists. "Roger said you would, and I thought you would--and you do not," she said sadly. I clenched a handful of the moist sand and leaned toward her, my heart pounding furiously. "Are you sorry?" I muttered unsteadily, fixing my eyes on hers. She met them fully. Like great grey pools they were, her eyes, honest as mountain springs, clear as rain. They caught me and held me and drenched me in their innocent, warm sweetness; there was not one thought in her head, not one corner in her heart that I was not free to know. Those eyes had never held a secret since they opened into a world that had never, to her knowledge, deceived her. They swam in light, and oh, the depths on depths of love that one could sound there! My last hateful anchor broke clean off and my heart slipped from the stupid rocks of suspicion and self-protection and jealousy, and floated away on the bosom of that sweet,
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