"Thank you," said he, still in the same abstraction. He shook hands with
her, moved hesitatingly toward the door. With his hand on the knob he
turned and glanced keenly at her. He surprised in her face a look of
mystery--of seriousness, of sadness--was there anxiety in it, also? And
then he saw a certain elusive reminder of her father--and it brought to
him with curious force the memory of how she had been brought up, of
what must be hers by inheritance and by training--she, the daughter of a
great and simple and noble man----
"You'll come again?" she said, and there was the note in her voice that
made his nerves grow tense and vibrate.
But he seemed not to have heard her question. Still at the unopened
door, he folded his arms upon his chest and said, speaking rapidly yet
with the deliberation of one who has thought out his words in advance:
"I don't know what kind of girl you are. I never have known. I've never
wanted to know. If you told me you were--what is called good, I'd doubt
it. If you told me you weren't, I'd want to kill you and myself. They
say there's a fatal woman for every man and a fatal man for every woman.
I always laughed at the idea--until you. I don't know what to make of
myself."
She suddenly laid her finger on her lips. It irritated him, to discover
that, as he talked, speaking the things that came from the very depths
of his soul, she had been giving him only part of her attention, had
been listening for a step on the stairs. He was hearing the ascending
step now. He frowned. "Can't you send him away?" he asked.
"I must," said she in a low tone. "It wouldn't do for him to know you
were here. He has strict ideas--and is terribly jealous."
A few seconds of silence, then a knock on the other side of the door.
"Who's there?" she called.
"I'm a little early," came in an agreeable, young man's voice. "Aren't
you ready?"
"Not nearly," replied she, in a laughing, innocent voice. "You'll have
to go away for half an hour."
"I'll wait out here on the steps."
Her eyes were sparkling. A delicate color had mounted to her skin.
Norman, watching her jealously, clinched his strong jaws. She said:
"No--you must go clear away. I don't want to feel that I'm being
hurried. Don't come back until a quarter past four."
"All right. I'm crazy to see you." This in the voice of a lover. She
smiled radiantly at Norman, as if she thought he would share in her
happiness at these evidences of her being well loved. The unseen young
man said: "Exactly a quarter past. What time does your clock say it is
now?"
"A quarter to," replied she.
"That's what my watch says. So there'll be no mistake. For half an
hour--good-by!"
"Half an hour!" she called.
She and Norman stood in silence until the footsteps died away. Then she
said crossly to Norman: "You ought to have gone before. I don't like to
do these things."
"You do them well," said he, with a savage gleam.
She was prompt and sure with his punishment. She said, simply and
sweetly: "I'd do anything to keep _his_ good opinion of me."
Norman felt and looked cowed. "You don't know how it makes me suffer to
see you fond of another man," he cried.
She seemed not in the least interested, went to the mirror of the bureau
and began to inspect her hair with a view to doing it up. "You can go in
five minutes," said she. "By that time he'll be well out of the way.
Anyhow, if he saw you leaving the house he'd not know but what you had
been to see some one else. He knows you by reputation but not by sight."
Norman went to her, took her by the shoulders gently but strongly. "Look
at me," he said.
She looked at him with an expression, or perhaps absence of expression,
that was simple listening.
"If you meant awhile ago some such thing as I hinted--I will have
nothing to do with it. You must marry me--or it's nothing at all."
Her gaze did not wander, but before his wondering eyes she seemed to
fade, fade toward colorlessness insignificance. The light died from
her eyes, the flush of health from her white skin, the freshness from
her lips, the sparkle and vitality from her hair. A slow, gradual
transformation, which he watched with a frightened tightening at the
heart.