That hunger for something denied
him--the "It" which he was always holding at bay--sprang upon him, and
shook his self-control.
"We've known each other a long time, haven't we, Cynthia?" he said,
smiling, and holding out her ball of wool.
Cynthia hardly concealed her start of pleasure. She looked up, shaking
her hair from her white brow and temples with a graceful gesture, half
responsive, half melancholy.
"So long!" she said--"it doesn't bear thinking of."
"Not at all. You haven't aged a bit. I want you to help me in something,
Cynthia. You remember how you helped me out of one or two scrapes in the
old days?"
They both laughed. Cynthia remembered very well. That scrape, for
instance, with the seductive little granddaughter of the retired village
school-master--a veritable Ancient of Days, who had been the witness of
an unlucky kiss behind a hedge, and had marched up instanter, in his
wrath, to complain to Lord Buntingford _grand-pere._ Or that much worse
scrape, when a lad of nineteen, with not enough to do in his Oxford
vacation, had imagined himself in love with a married lady of the
neighbourhood, twenty years older than himself, and had had to be packed
off in disgrace to Switzerland with a coach:--an angry grandfather
breathing fire and slaughter.
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