Her face instantly sharpened to distrust. “I had to live,” she said in an off-hand tone.
“I understand perfectly that you should like it here–for a time.” His glance strayed down the gold-roofed windings ahead of them. “It’s delightful: you couldn’t be better placed. Only I wonder a little at your having so completely given up any idea of a different future.”
She waited for a moment before answering: “I suppose I’m less restless than I used to be.”
“It’s certainly natural that you should be less restless here than at Mrs. Murrett’s; yet somehow I don’t seem to see you permanently given up to forming the young.”
“What–exactly–DO you seem to see me permanently given up to? You know you warned me rather emphatically against the theatre.” She threw off the statement without impatience, as though they were discussing together the fate of a third person in whom both were benevolently interested. Darrow considered his reply. “If I did, it was because you so emphatically refused to let me help you to a start.”
She stopped short and faced him “And you think I may let you now?”
Darrow felt the blood in his cheek. He could not understand her attitude–if indeed she had consciously taken one, and her changes of tone did not merely reflect the involuntary alternations of her mood. It humbled him to perceive once more how little he had to guide him in his judgment of her. He said to himself: “If I’d ever cared a straw for her I should know how to avoid hurting her now”–and his insensibility struck him as no better than a vulgar obtuseness. But he had a fixed purpose ahead and could only push on to it.
“I hope, at any rate, you’ll listen to my reasons. There’s been time, on both sides, to think them over since—-” He caught himself back and hung helpless on the “since”: whatever words he chose, he seemed to stumble among reminders of their past.
She walked on beside him, her eyes on the ground. “Then I’m to understand–definitely–that you DO renew your offer?” she asked
“With all my heart! If you’ll only let me—-”
She raised a hand, as though to check him. “It’s extremely friendly of you-I DO believe you mean it as a friend– but I don’t quite understand why, finding me, as you say, so well placed here, you should show more anxiety about my future than at a time when I was actually, and rather desperately, adrift.”
“Oh, no, not more!”
“If you show any at all, it must, at any rate, be for different reasons.–In fact, it can only be,” she went on, with one of her disconcerting flashes of astuteness, “for one of two reasons; either because you feel you ought to help me, or because, for some reason, you think you owe it to Mrs. Leath to let her know what you know of me.”
Darrow stood still in the path. Behind him he heard Effie’s call, and at the child’s voice he saw Sophy turn her head with the alertness of one who is obscurely on the watch. The look was so fugitive that he could not have said wherein it differed from her normal professional air of having her pupil on her mind.
Effie sprang past them, and Darrow took up the girl’s challenge.
“What you suggest about Mrs. Leath is hardly worth answering. As to my reasons for wanting to help you, a good deal depends on the words one uses to define rather indefinite things. It’s true enough that I want to help you; but the wish isn’t due to…to any past kindness on your part, but simply to my own interest in you. Why not put it that our friendship gives me the right to intervene for what I believe to be your benefit?”
She took a few hesitating steps and then paused again. Darrow noticed that she had grown pale and that there were rings of shade about her eyes.
“You’ve known Mrs. Leath a long time?” she asked him suddenly.
He paused with a sense of approaching peril. “A long time– yes.”
“She told me you were friends–great friends”