Don’t expect me to describe my sensations: hundreds of sensations flew all over me. There she was, sitting alone, near the window! There she was, with nimble white fingers, working a silk purse!
The melancholy in her face and manner, when I had last seen her, appeared no more. She was prettily dressed in maize color, and the room was well furnished. Her father had evidently got over his difficulties. I had been inclined to laugh at his odd name, when I found it in the directory! Now I began to dislike it, because it was her name, too. It was a consolation to remember that she could change it. Would she change it for mine?
I was the first to recover; I boldly drew a chair near her and took her hand.
“You see,” I said, “it is of no use to try to avoid me. This is the third time we have met. Will you receive me as a visitor, under these extraordinary circumstances? Will you give me a little happiness to compensate for what I have suffered since you left me?”
“I am so surprised,” she answered, “I don’t know what to say.”
She first went on with her work, and then replied (a little sadly, as I thought):
I was ready enough to take advantage of my opportunities this time; but she contrived with perfect politeness to stop me. She seemed to remember with shame, poor soul, the circumstances under which I had last seen her.
“How do you come to be at Duskydale?” she inquired, abruptly changing the subject. “And how did you find us out here?”
While I was giving her the necessary explanations her father came in. I looked at him with considerable curiosity.
A tall stout gentleman with impressive respectability oozing out of him at every pore--with a swelling outline of black-waistcoated stomach, with a lofty forehead, with a smooth double chin resting pulpily on a white cravat. Everything in harmony about him except his eyes, and these were so sharp, bright and resolute that they seemed to contradict the bland conventionality which overspread all the rest of the man. Eyes with wonderful intelligence and self-dependence in them; perhaps, also, with something a little false in them, which I might have discovered immediately under ordinary circumstances: but I looked at the doctor through the medium of his daughter, and saw nothing of him at the first glance but his merits.