This is chiefly my own doing.
"You will not mind," I say, standing before him one day in the drawing-room window, and speaking rather bashfully--somehow I do not feel so comfortably easy and outspoken with him as I did before the catastrophe--"you will not mind if I do not see much of you--do not go out walking--do not talk to you very much till--till _it_ is over!" "And why am I not to mind ?" he asks, half jestingly, and yet a little gravely, too.
"You will have quite enough--_too much_ of me afterward," I say, with a shy laugh, "and _they_--they will never have much of me again--never so much, at least--and" (with rather a tremble in my voice) "we have had _such_ fun together!" And so Sir Roger keeps away.

Whether his self-denial costs him much, I cannot say.

It never occurs to me at the time that it does.

He may think me a very nice little girl, and that I shall be a great comfort to him, but he cannot care much about having any very long conversations with me--he that has seen so many lands, and known so many great and clever people, and read so many books.

He has always been _most_ undemonstrative to me.