Don't talk as if it were at an end.

How could our friendship have an end?
Don't let me think that you are leaving me.' He smiled a little, but it was a valorous smile.

'I'll never leave you in that way.' 'Don't speak, then, as if I were leaving you.' But Franklin, though he smiled the valorous smile, couldn't give her a consolation not his to give.

Did he see clearly, and for the first time, that he had always counted for her as a solace, a substitute for the things he couldn't be, and that now, when these things had come to her, he counted really for nothing at all?
If he did see it, he didn't resent it; he would understand that, too, even though it left him with no foothold in her life.

But he couldn't pretend--to give her comfort--that she needed him any longer.