His face was full of kindness and he was curiously disturbed.
"You are the dearest child on earth, Nora," he said.

"I find myself wishing from the bottom of my heart that it were possible that you could be--something nearer and dearer to me." She looked feverishly into his face and pushed him away.
"Go and sit down and don't be absurd," she enjoined.

"Try and forget everything else except that you are going to eat an oyster stew.

That is really the way to take life, isn't it--in cycles--and it doesn't matter then whether one's happy times are bounded by the coming night or the coming years.

For five minutes, then, a paradise--of oyster stew." "It is distinctly the best oyster stew I have ever tasted in my life," he pronounced a few minutes later.
"It is very good indeed," she assented.