Page:Middle Aged Love Stories (IA middleagedlove00bacorich).djvu/167

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less ready to follow her mood with that wonderful delicacy of perception that had enabled her—shy, secluded, half troubled at the restlessness of her own eager heart—to talk to him as she had never been able to talk to her only sister. She remembered how every innocent ruse for concealing the scantiness of a meal had succeeded of late, and how unconsciously he had, at any excuse of hers, eaten what he would once have indignantly insisted that she should share. But more than all this, he had talked as he had never talked before of his childhood and his childhood's home. Miss Sabina had learned her Paris well from him long ago. For years in the winter evenings, when they could not enjoy the piazza and the green, they had sat by the Franklin grate in the sitting-room, and she had followed him breathlessly through "Les Misérables"—his rapid and broken translation heightening incalculably the sense of strangeness and intensity—or