He had attributed it at first to the
shock occasioned by her mother's illness and her departure with Portia
to California, but this explanation seemed not to cover the ground. Why
couldn't she have talked freely with him about that? Inquiries about her
health, attempts--clumsily executed, no doubt--to treat her with special
tenderness and guard her against overexertion, only irritated her, drove
her to the very edge of her self-control--or over it. She was all right,
she always said. He couldn't force confidences from her of course. But
her pale face and eyes wide with a trouble in them he could not fathom
stirred something deeper in him than the former glow and glory had ever
reached.
And there was a new thing that gripped him in a positively terrifying
way--a realization of his importance to her. The after-effect of her
invasion of his office the night of the Randolphs' dinner and of his
learning of the tremulous interest with which she had afterward followed
the case he was then working on, had been very different from his first
irritation and his first amusement.
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