But she had none of the formalism or the self-consciousness
of grief, and I was almost surprised to see her standing
there in the first dusk with her hands full of flowers,
smiling at me with her reddened eyes. Her white face,
in the frame of her mantilla, looked longer, leaner than usual.
I had had an idea that she would be a good deal disgusted
with me--would consider that I ought to have been on the spot
to advise her, to help her; and, though I was sure there
was no rancor in her composition and no great conviction
of the importance of her affairs, I had prepared myself
for a difference in her manner, for some little injured look,
half-familiar, half-estranged, which should say to my conscience,
"Well, you are a nice person to have professed things!"
But historic truth compels me to declare that Tita Bordereau's
countenance expressed unqualified pleasure in seeing her late
aunt's lodger. That touched him extremely, and he thought
it simplified his situation until he found it did not.
I was as kind to her that evening as I knew how to be,
and I walked about the garden with her for half an hour.
There was no explanation of any sort between us; I did not ask
her why she had not answered my letter. Still less did I repeat
what I had said to her in that communication; if she chose to let
me suppose that she had forgotten the position in which Miss
Bordereau surprised me that night and the effect of the discovery
on the old woman I was quite willing to take it that way:
I was grateful to her for not treating me as if I had
killed her aunt.
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