THE IVORY TOWER
—literally his young nerves. It was as if he had appealed to me to pronounce it positively cruel while I had felt at the first word that I really but blessed it. It wasn't too much for my young nerves—extraordinary as it may seem to you." Rosanna pursued, "that I should but have wished to undertake at a jump such a very large order. I wonder now from where my lucidity came, but just as I stood there I saw some things in a light in which, even with still better opportunities, I've never so much seen them since. It was as if I took everything in—and what everything meant; and, flopped there on his seat and always staring up at me, he understood that I was somehow inspired for him."
"My dear child, you're inspired at this moment!"—Davey Bradham rendered the tribute. "It's too splendid to hear of amid our greedy wants, our timid ideas and our fishy passions. You ring out like Brünnhilde at the opera. How jolly to have pronounced his doom!"
"Yes," she gravely said, "and you see how jolly I now find it. I settled it. I was fate," Rosanna puffed. "He recognised fate—all the more that he really wanted to; and you see therefore," she went on, "how it was to be in every single thing that has happened since."
"You stuck him fast there"—Mr. Bradham filled in the picture. "Yet not so fast after all," he understandingly added, "but that you've been
39
