"There's the steamer—do you see? Patience rewarded. They have a Lord on board and a returning Chief Justice, and the loyal citizens down to meet them have had no dinner. They've been waiting on the pier at Williamstown for hours. Come and sit down, won't you? I'm sure your little feet must be tired."
He used the adjective inadvertently, and Jenny shied at it for a moment, like a dazzled horse. But she had not the strength to resist her intense desire to be with him a little longer, especially with that word, that tone of voice, compelling her.
"I must be going home," she murmured, but was drawn as by a magnet after him when he turned to the bench on which she had before been sitting.
"It can't be more than eight o'clock, and now's the time you ought to be out, when it's cool and fresh," said he. "Don't you find the heat of that room very trying since the warm weather came?"
They talked about the tea-room in an ordinary way. Then they drifted into confidences about each other's private lives and interests; and from that they went on to discuss their respective views as to books, creeds, and the serious matters of life; and all the time Anthony Churchill kept a tight hand upon himself, that he might not frighten her. It had to be a very strenuous hand indeed, for it was a sentimental night, with the sea and the stars and the soft wind, and she had never looked so sweet as now, away from all the associations of the tea-room, which he had grown to hate, sitting pensively at rest, with her little hands in her lap. More than that, he had never known how well she was educated, how much thinking she had done, how intellectually interesting she was, until he had had this talk with her.
At last, in an unguarded moment, he said more than he had meant to say. Laying his hat beside him, that he might feel the cool fan of the wind over his slightly fevered brain, he drew a long breath, and exclaimed in a burst, "Well, you have given me a happy hour! I wonder when you'll give me another like it?"
Immediately she began to recollect how late it was, and to be in a flurry to get home to her mother. All at once the suspicion that he might be divining her feeling for him, and that she might be running wicked risks, assailed her. She rose from her seat without speaking.
"Not yet!" he pleaded impulsively, as she looked for him to rise too; "not yet! Five minutes more!" And he took her hand, which hung near him, and tried to draw her back to his side, looking up at her in all the beauty of his broad brows, and his bold nose, and his commanding manliness, with eyes that burned through hers to her shaking heart. This was love-making, she knew, though not a word of love was spoken, and, under all the circumstances surrounding him and her in their social life, it terrified her.
"I have stayed too long already," she said. "I ought not to have been here alone—so late."
The tremble in her voice, as well as the implication of her words, shocked him, and he pulled himself up sharply, regretting his indiscretions as much as she did hers.