"What?"
"Love me!" the man breathed very close to her.
"I don't know," she replied, struggling to regain her refuge in the
corner from which his embrace had dragged her.
And just here Ashly Crane committed an irretrievable blunder, due to
those imperfections of nature and technique which have been described
before. As the cab lurched, throwing the girl nearer him, he grasped her
very firmly and kissed her. The Kaiser Nonsuch sailed on the Thursday,
and it was now Monday....
As his mustached lips sought her small mouth and met the cold, hard
little lips, he knew that he had taken a fearful risk. Adelle did not
scream. She did not struggle very much. She took the kiss passively, as
if she had some curiosity to know what a man's kiss was like. After he
had given it with sufficient ardor and was ready to relax his passionate
embrace, she drew back calmly into her corner and looked at him very
coolly out of her gray eyes. After the flurry of the struggle, with her
brown hair slightly awry, her hat tipped back, and her lips still half
open as they had been forced by his kiss, she was almost pretty. But
those gray eyes looked at him as no girl ought to look after her lover's
first kiss, and let us hope as few girls do look. Mr. Ashly Crane read
there that he had lost his chance with the heiress. There was just
enough of spirit even in his common clay to divine this. If only he had
not been so hasty!--not tried to "put the thing through" before sailing,
and do it in the manner of the "whirl-wind campaign"....
For a moment or two there was silence within the cab while the car
rocked on in its mad race for London. They were well within the
outskirts of the city now, and the banker knew that there would not be
time to work up to another crisis. He must defer the recovery until the
morrow, if he could summon courage to go on with it at all. But the girl
still stared at him out of her wide-open eyes, as if she were saying in
her small head--"So that's what a man's kiss is like." He muttered
uncomfortably a lot of nonsense about forgetting himself, and her
forgiving him,--ignorant that in such a grave matter forgiveness is
always out of the question: either it is not needed, or it cannot
possibly be given. Adelle said nothing, merely looked at him until he
was driven to turn his head away and gaze out of the swiftly moving cab
at the lighted streets to escape the wonder and the surprise and the
contempt in those gray eyes. As they turned into Piccadilly, he remarked
brusquely,--"I shall come to-morrow morning--and get your answer!" That
was to "save his face," as we say, for her answer was written in those
eyes. Again he took her little ungloved hand and tried to bear it to his
lips. But this time Adelle gently, firmly extracted it from his grasp
and placed it behind her back with its mate, safely out of reach, still
looking at him gravely.
Crane helped her out of the cab, and turned to pay the driver, who was
beaming with expectation of an extra fee for his participation in this
adventure. When he had settled the fare, Adelle had disappeared within
the hotel. Judging that it might be unwise to follow her, Mr. Ashly
Crane walked off to his hotel, scowling along the way, very little
pleased with himself. He was really more mortified at discovering how
poor an artist in the business he was than by his ill success itself.
"Nothing but a meek, pale-faced, little school-girl, too!" he was saying
to himself. And aloud,--"Oh, damn the women."