"For your sake, Eustace, I will try to forget." I raised him gently as I spoke.

He kissed my hands with the air of a man who was too humble to venture on any more familiar expression of his gratitude than that.

The sense of embarrassment between us as we slowly walked on again was so unendurable that I actually cast about in my mind for a subject of conversation, as if I had been in the company of a stranger! In mercy to _him_, I asked him to tell me about the yacht.
He seized on the subject as a drowning man seizes on the hand that rescues him.
On that one poor little topic of the yacht he talked, talked, talked, as if his life depended upon his not being silent for an instant on the rest of the way back.

To me it was dreadful to hear him.

I could estimate what he was suffering by the violence which he--ordinarily a silent and thoughtful man--was now doing to his true nature, and to the prejudices and habits of his life.