Are you not going to
see her at all?"
"Well, I shall think about that; I am here only for three or four days,"
said Ransom, smiling as men smile when they are perfectly
unsatisfactory.
It is very possible that Verena was provoked, inaccessible as she was,
in a general way, to irritation; for she rejoined in a moment, with a
little deliberate air: "Well, perhaps it's as well you shouldn't go, if
you haven't changed at all."
"I haven't changed at all," said the young man, smiling still, with his
elbows on the arms of his chair, his shoulders pushed up a little, and
his thin brown hands interlocked in front of him.
"Well, I have had visitors who were quite opposed!" Verena announced, as
if such news could not possibly alarm her. Then she added, "How then did
you know I was out here?"
"Miss Birdseye told me."
"Oh, I am so glad you went to see _her_!" the girl cried, speaking again
with the impetuosity of a moment before.
"I didn't go to see her. I met her in the street, just as she was
leaving Miss Chancellor's door. I spoke to her, and accompanied her some
distance. I passed that way because I knew it was the direct way to
Cambridge--from the Common--and I was coming out to see you any way--on
the chance."
"On the chance?" Verena repeated.
"Yes; Mrs. Luna, in New York, told me you were sometimes here, and I
wanted, at any rate, to make the attempt to find you."
It may be communicated to the reader that it was very agreeable to
Verena to learn that her visitor had made this arduous pilgrimage (for
she knew well enough how people in Boston regarded a winter journey to
the academic suburb) with only half the prospect of a reward; but her
pleasure was mixed with other feelings, or at least with the
consciousness that the whole situation was rather less simple than the
elements of her life had been hitherto.
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