I bit my tongue in shamed regret, and dared not let my glance meet hers.
Of all things in the world, this was precisely what I should not have
uttered--what I wanted least to say. But it had been said, and I was
covered with confusion. The necessity of saying something to bridge over
this chasm of insensate indiscretion tugged at my senses, and
finally--after what had seemed an age of silence--I stammered on:

"What I mean is, we never liked each other. Why, the first time we ever
met, we fought. You cannot remember it, but we did. He knocked me into the
ashes. And then there was our dispute at Albany--in the Patroon's mansion,
you will recall. And then at Quebec. I have never told you of this," I
went on, recklessly, "but we met that morning in the snow, as Montgomery
fell. He knew me, dark as it still was, and we grappled. This scar here,"
I pointed to a reddish seam across my temple and cheek, "this was
his doing."

I have said that I could never meet Daisy in these days without feeling
that, mere chronology to the opposite notwithstanding, she was much the
older and more competent person of the two. This sense of juvenility
overwhelmed me now, as she calmly rose and put her hand on my shoulder,
and took a restful, as it were maternal, charge of me and my mind.

"My dear Douw," she said, with as fine an assumption of quiet, composed
superiority as if she had not up to that moment been talking the veriest
nonsense, "I understand just what you mean. Do not think, if I seem
sometimes thoughtless or indifferent, that I am not aware of your
feelings, or that I fail to appreciate the fondness you have always given
me. I know what you would have said----"

"It was exactly what I most of all would _not_ have said," I broke in