Dodo's Daughter A Sequel to Dodo by E. F. Benson

Author:E. F. Benson [Benson, E. F. (Edward Frederic)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

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Seymour had declined to take part in this guide-book conference, saying with truth that he felt sure it would all be very completely explained to him next day, and let himself out into the streets of the town which were already growing empty of passengers. Above the sky was lucent with many stars, and the moon which had risen an hour before, cleared the house-roofs and shone down into the street with a very white light, making the gas-lamps look red. Last night it had been full, and from the terrace at Winston they had all watched it rise, full-flaring, over the woods below the house. Then he and Nadine had strolled away together, and in that luminous solitude with her, he had felt himself constrained and tongue-tied. He had no longer at command the talk that usually rose so glibly to his lips, that gay, witty, inconsequent gabble that had truthfully represented what went on in his quick discerning brain. His brain now was taken up with one topic only, and it was as hard for him to speak to her of that, as it was for him to speak of anything else. He knew that she had entered into her engagement with him, in the same spirit in which he had proposed to her. They liked each other; each found the other a stimulating companion; by each no doubt the attraction of the other's good looks was felt. She, he was certain, regarded him now as she had regarded him then, while for him the whole situation had undergone so complete a change, that he felt that the very fortress of his identity had been stormed and garrisoned by the besieging host. And what was the host? That tall girl with the white slim hands, who, without intention, had picked up a key and, cursorily, so it seemed, had unlocked his heart, so that it stood open to her. Honestly, he did not know that it was made to unlock: he had thought of it always as some toy Swiss châlet, not meant to be opened. But she had opened it, and gone inside.

The streets grew emptier: lights appeared behind blinds in upper windows, and only an occasional step sounded on the pavements. He had come to an open market place, and from where he paused and stood the western towers of the cathedral rose above the intervening roofs, and aspired whitely into the dark velvet of the night. Hitherto, Seymour would have found nothing particular to say about moonlight, in which he took but the very faintest interest, except that it tended to provoke an untimely loquaciousness in cats. But to-night he found his mind flooded with the most hackneyed and commonplace reflections. It reminded him of Nadine; it was white and chaste and aloof like her ... he wanted her, and he was going to get her, and yet would she really be his in the sense that he was hers? Then for a

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