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.
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