She found it easy to name some of
the things that were _not_ the reason. It was not--oh, a thousand times
it was not!--that she wasn't quite sure of him. There was no expressing
the completeness of her certainty that, with a look, a sudden holding
out of the hands to him, the release of one little love-cry from her
lips, a half-articulate, "Come and take me, Roddy! That's all I want!"
she could have shattered, annihilated, that brittle restraint of his;
released the full tempest of his passion; found herself--lost
herself--in his embrace.
Certainly it was no doubt of that that had held her back. And, no more
than doubt, was it pride or modesty. The one thing her whole being was
crying out for was a complete surrender to him.
But the real reason seemed rather absurd, when she tried to state it to
herself. She had felt that it would be a _brutal_ thing to do. Really,
her feeling toward him was that of a mother toward a child who, having,
he thinks, merited her displeasure, offers her, by way of atonement,
some dearly prized possession; an iron fire-engine, a woolly sheep.
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