Now you see what absolute confidence I repose in you,
and how heavily this strange story bears against myself. Could I have
given it to any one for whom I had not a brother's love, and in whom I
did not hope to find a sister's gentle charity? I show you how unspent
is the force of all those years when we had scarcely a thought which
we could not tell each other. I have little claim, though, to be a
protecting brother, when I have been making such an egregious fool of
myself. You have grown wiser and stronger than I. You won't think very
harshly of me, will you, Madge?"
"No, Graydon."
"And you won't condemn my fraternal affection as contrary to nature?"
She was sorely at a loss. She had listened with quickened breath, a
fluttering pulse, and in a growing tumult of hope and fear, to this
undisguised revelation of his attitude toward her. She almost thought
that she detected between the lines, as it were, the beginning of a
different regard. He believed that he had been frankness itself,
and his words proved that he looked upon his fraternal affection and
confidence as the natural, the almost inevitable, sequence of the
past. She could not meet him on the fraternal ground that he was
taking again, nor did she wish him to occupy it in his own mind.
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