Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/314
presence was not lost, and flung answers to the observations of his host, the impression of pathos clung to him. Johanna decided that she liked him. He was not of a pattern with the rest of her uncle's guests.
He stayed a week at the farm, then went away for a few days, and then returned. Johanna treated him with absolute trust, the affectionate trust of a little child. Ormond, on his part, fell passionately in love with her. But this feeling he did not manifest. There was nothing vulgar, nothing positive about his wooing. He had been in the habit all through life of suppressing his emotions. His intensity had been unwelcome at home to the widowed, shrewish mother with whom he lived. So he had become used to reserve, and, as use is second nature, had grown to like it. Though there was about him, in his every look, his every word, his every action, something that Johanna would have expressed as kindness the most patent, there was nothing to tell the girl she was the personification of all he had in his solitary life dreamed of as heaven, the possible heaven of this earthly sphere.
There are men whom women could swear loved them unselfishly. Their manner betokens the essence of highest, purest, least human love. Women have wept to see such love, have laughed aloud, with the teardrops still dewing their eyes, to find themselves mistaken. There came no opportunity to Johanna to change the impression she had received of Ole Ormond. She never knew that his way of loving her was selfish. Had she been told so she would have been unable to believe it. Had she at last been convinced, she would have been very grieved. Every action of her immediate after-life was founded on this belief, that Ole loved her with such completeness that he would forego all things for her sake, voluntarily arrange all things for her happiness. Love, so she thought, meant selflessness with Ole.
Ormond