but I
ostentatiously let Miss Kate alone, shyness would creep into her
apprehension to make amends for its first crude manifestations.

As the days went by and I displayed still the fine sense to keep myself
aloof, to seek Miss Kate only in those ways that I sought her refreshing
mother, she let me discern more clearly her faith in my firmness and
good sense. To be plain, in reward for letting her alone, she did not
let me alone. And this reward I accepted becomingly, with a resolve--the
metal of which I hoped she would divine--never to show myself
undeserving of its benisons.

When I say that the young woman did not let me alone, I mean that she
seemed almost to put herself in my way; not obviously, true enough, but
in a degree palpable enough to one who had observed her first almost
shrinking alarm. And this behavior of hers went forward, at last,
without the slightest leaven of apprehension on her part, but her
shyness remained. It was so marked and so novel in her--with reference
to myself--that I could not fail to be sensible to it. It was as if she
divined that mad notions might still lurk within my untaught mind to be
reasons why she should fear me; but that her confidence in my
self-mastery could not, at the same time, be too openly shown.

Tacitly, it was as if we had treated together; a treaty that bound me to
observe a perpetual truce. My arms were forever laid down, and she, who
had once so feared me, was now free to wander when she would within the
lines of an honorable enemy. That she should walk there with increasing
frequency as the days passed was a tribute to my powers of restraint
which I was too wise to undervalue. I ignored the shyness of which she
seemed unable to divest herself in my presence. It would have been easy
not to ignore it, for there were times when, so little careful was she
to guard herself, that this shyness suggested, invited, appealed,
signalled; times when, without my deeper knowledge of her sex, I could
have sworn that the true woman-call rang in my ears. But a treaty is a
treaty, on paper or on honor, and ours would never be broken by black
treachery of mine, let her eyes fall under my own with never so
fluttering an allurement.

They were not bad days, as days go in this earth-life of too much exact
knowledge. Miss Kate rowed me over still waters and walked beside me in
green pastures. At times like these she might even seem to forget. She
would even become, I must affirm,