She engaged one of his hands and stroked it softly with her free palm.
It was all so sordid, hard to bear, the boy continued . . . something to get over with . . . my beloved dead and my hated living! That is what I felt. I had to stay there with her, because I wanted to protect her, if you know what I mean, from everything she hated too. It took just this, her death and what has followed, to make me understand just how much she had suffered, how much she had hated him too. And there he was all the time: I stood between him and her . . . but also, he stood between her and me.
My poor boy! Tell me all about it, all about everything you feel. It will do you good. She continued to stroke his limp hand, but he gave no evidence that he was conscious of this attention.
You see, he went on, the day my mother . . . he choked . . . just before she was operated on, my father, in the hospital, told me that I might go to college, that he had promised her . . . How I hated him then! I never knew how much I hated him before. It was almost as if she had sacrificed her life to force him to make this promise. And, at that moment, I knew, too, how she had hated him, how much she had endured for my sake. She went on, nobly, suffering for me, and I don't think I was worth it!
Don't say that! cried the Countess, letting, in her state of torture, his hand fall into his lap. I'm
