Life is too short to wipe
out such a bad impression. I know how you'll remember me all your days;
as an idiot with a head done up in layers of toweling, wobbling on two
crutches and gaping at you like a fish."
But the duchess was still holding my hand in both of hers and smiling
up at me from a pair of great, dark, tender eyes, the loveliest pair
of eyes in the world, bar one. No, bar none, to be quite fair. The
Firefly's wife, most people would have said, was more beautiful than her
sister; but then, beauty is what pleases you, as some wise man remarked
long ago.
"I don't believe, Mr. Bayne," she was saying gently, "that I shall
ever remember you in any unpleasant way. You see, I know about those
bandages, and I know why you need those crutches. Even if you were vain,
you wouldn't mind the things I think of you--not at all."
I lack any clear recollection of the quarter of an hour that followed.
I know that we talked and laughed and were very friendly and very
cheerful, and that Dunny's eyes, as they studied me, began to hold
a gleam of intelligence, as if he were guessing something about the
reasons for my former black despondency.
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