Still he did not look at her, and it was easier, so, to let him have the last gulp.
“I probably should.”
He meditated the mixed flavor for some moments; pure gall would have been easier to swallow. And he took refuge at last in school-boy phraseology. “I should like to break all the furniture in the room.”
“I should like to break some, too,” she rejoined, but she laughed out suddenly at this anticlimax, and, even before the unbroken heaviness of the gaze now turned on her, that comic aspect of their talk, the dearly, sanely comic, carried her laugh into a peal as boyish as his words.
Grainger still gazed at her. “I love that in you,” he said—“your laugh. You could laugh at death.”
“Ah, Jim,” she said, smiling on, though with the laughter tears had come to her eyes, “it’s a good deal more difficult to laugh at life, sometimes. And we both have to do a lot of living before we can laugh at death.”
“A lot of living,” he repeated. His stern, firm face had a queer grimace of pain at the prospect of it, and again she put out her hand to him.
“Let me count for as much as I can, always,” she said. “You will always count for so much with me.”
He had taken the hand, and he looked at her in a long silence that promised, accepted, everything.
But an appeal, a demand, wistful yet insistent, came into his silence as he looked—looked at the odd, pale, dear face, the tawny, russet hair, the dear, deep eyes.