Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
"People don't know how really good you are. You will not let them know, as if on purpose to annoy me, who have put my faith in your good heart long ago."
The doctor, with a lifting up of his upper lip, as though he were longing to bite, bowed stiffly in his chair. With the utter absorption of a man to whom love comes late, not as a most splendid of illusions, but like an enlightening and priceless misfortune, the sight of that woman (of whom he had been deprived for about eighteen months) suggested ideas of adoration, of kissing the hem of her robe. And this excess of feeling translated itself naturally by an augmented grimness of speech.
"I am afraid of being overwhelmed by too much gratitude. However, these people interest me. I went out several times to the Great Isabel light to look after old Giorgio."
He did not tell Mrs. Gould that it was because he found there, in her absence, the relief of an atmosphere of congenial sentiment in old Giorgio’s austere admiration of the English signora—the benefactress; in black-eyed Linda's voluble, torrential, passionate affection for "our Doña Emilia—that angel"; in the white-throated, fair Giselle's adoring upward turn of the eyes, which then glided towards him with a side-long, half-arch, half-candid glance, which made the doctor exclaim to himself, mentally, "If I weren't what I am, old and ugly, I would think the sly minx is making eyes at me. And perhaps she is. I dare say she would make eyes at anybody." Dr. Monygham said nothing of this to Mrs. Gould, the provi-
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