'Do you, Tom?' she whispered.
'Lettice…!'
'Then believe at least—' her voice wavered suddenly, there came a little break in it—'that I am true to you, Tom, as I am to myself. Believe in that… and—Oh! for the love of heaven—help me!'
Before he could respond, before he could act upon the hope and passion her last unexpected words set loose in him—she turned away to go into the house. Voices were audible behind them, and Miss de Lorne was coming up the sandy drive with Mrs. Haughstone. Tom watched her go. She moved with a certain gliding, swaying walk as she passed along the verandah and disappeared behind the curtains of dried grass. It almost seemed—though this must certainly have been a trick of light and shadow—that she was swathed from head to foot in a clinging garment not of modern kind, and that he caught the gleam of gold upon the flesh of dusky arms that were bare above the elbow. Two persons were visible in her very physical appearance, as two persons had just been audible in her words. Thence came the conflict and the contradictions.
CHAPTER XXV.
A few minutes later Lettice was presiding over her luncheon table as though life were simple as the sunlight in the street outside, and no clouds could ever fleck the procession of the years. She was quiet and yet betrayed excitement. Tom, at the opposite end of the table, watched her girlish figure, her graceful gestures. Her eyes were very bright, no shadows in their depths; she returned his gaze with untroubled frankness. Yet the set of her little mouth had self-mastery in it somewhere; there was no wavering or uncertainty; her self-possession was complete. But above his head the sword of Damocles hung. He saw the thread, taut and gleaming in the glare of the Egyptian sunlight.… He waited upon his cousin's return as men once waited for the sign thumbs up, thumbs down.…
'Molly has sent me her album,' mentioned Mrs. Haughstone when the four of them were lounging in the garden chairs; 'she wonders if you would write your name in it. It's her passion—to fill it with distinguished names.' And when the page was found, she pointed to the quotation against his birthday date with the remark, in a lowered voice: 'It's quite appropriate, isn't it? For a man, I mean,' she added, 'because when a man's unhappy he's more easily tempted to suspicion than a woman is.'
'What is the quotation?' asked Lettice, glancing up from her deck chair.
Tom was carefully inscribing his 'distinguished' name in the child's album, as Mrs. Haughstone read the words aloud over his shoulder: