Roger yielded to the vehemence of this flood of emotion. He stood watching her with two helpless tears in his own eyes, and then he drew her gently towards him and kissed her on the forehead. She took up her work again, and he told her, with every minutest detail he could recall, the story of his sole brief interview with Mr. Lambert. Gradually he lost the sense of effort and reluctance, and talked freely, abundantly, almost with pleasure. Nora listened very solemnly,—with an amount of self-control which denoted the habit of constant retrospect. She asked a hundred questions as to Roger’s impression of her father’s appearance. Was he not wonderfully handsome? Then taking up the tale herself, she poured out a torrent of feverish reminiscence. She disinterred her early memories with a kind of rapture of relief. Her evident joy in this frolic of confidence gave Roger a pitying sense of what her long silence must have cost her. But evidently she bore him no grudge, and his present tolerance of her rambling gossip seemed to her but another proof of his charity. She rose at last, and stood before the fire, into which she had thrown the refuse of her greenery, watching it blaze up and turn to ashes. “So much for the past!” she said, at last. “The rest is the future. The girls at school used to be always talking about what they meant to do in coming years, what they hoped, what they wished; wondering, choosing, imagining. You don’t know how girls talk, Roger: you would be surprised! I never used to say much: my future is fixed. I have nothing to choose, nothing to hope, nothing to fear. I am to make you happy. That’s simple enough. You have undertaken to bring me up, Roger; you must do your best, because now I am here, it’s for long, and you would rather have a wise girl than a silly one.” And she smiled with a kind of tentative daughterliness through the traces of her recent grief. She put her two hands on his shoulders and eyed him with conscious gravity. “You shall never repent. I shall learn everything, I shall be everything! Oh! I wish I were pretty.” And she tossed back her head, in impatience of her fatal plainness, with an air which forced Roger to assure her that she would do very well as she was. “If you are satisfied,” she said, “I am!” For a moment Roger felt as if she were twenty years old.