“More than that, Agnes, I knew, almost as if I had known this story, that there was something inexplicably gentle and softened, surrounding you; something that might have been sorrowful in someone else (as I can now understand it was), but was not so in you.”

She softly played on, looking at me still.

“Will you laugh at my cherishing such fancies, Agnes?”

“No!”

“Or at my saying that I really believe I felt, even then, that you could be faithfully affectionate against all discouragement, and never cease to be so, until you ceased to live?⁠—Will you laugh at such a dream?”

“Oh, no! Oh, no!”

For an instant, a distressful shadow crossed her face; but, even in the start it gave me, it was gone; and she was playing on, and looking at me with her own calm smile.