"How I wish,"
he told me, "that I had made that conversation longer. It was so very
short and I might so easily have lengthened it. There were so many
things afterwards that I might have said--and she never gave me
another chance."
She never did--she kept him from her. Kind to him, perhaps, but never
allowing him another moment's intimacy. He had almost the air, it
seemed to me, of patiently waiting for the moment when she should need
him, the air too of a man who was sure, in his heart, that that moment
would come.
And the other thing that stiffened him was his hatred for Semyonov.
Hatred may seem too fierce a word for the emotion of any one as mild
and gentle as Trenchard--and yet hatred at this time it was. He seemed
no longer afraid of Semyonov and there was something about him now
which surprised the other man. Through all those first days at
Mittoevo, when we seemed for a moment almost to have slipped out of the
war and to be leading the smaller more quarrelsome life of earlier
days, Trenchard was occupied with only one question--"What was he
feeling about Semyonov?"--"I felt as though I could stand anything if
only she didn't love him.
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