She had closed her eyes for a moment under the stress of her pain. When she opened them, he was looking at her. And the look she knew was at last in his eyes. She put up her hand to ward it off; it woke her horror, but it woke her delight also. She could not choose whether to banish it, or to live in it all her life. She tried to speak, but her utterance was choked.
"Why, I believe you're—jealous," said Willie Ruston. "But then they always say I'm a conceited chap."
He spoke with a laugh, but he looked at her intently. The little scene was the climax of a week's gradual betrayal. Often in all the hours they had spent together, in all the engrossing talks they had had, something of the kind had appeared and disappeared; he had wondered at her changefulness, her moods of expansion and of coldness—a rapturous greeting of him to be followed by a cold dismissal—an eager sympathy alternating with wilful indifference. She had, too, fits of prudence, when she would not go with him—and then spasms of recklessness when her manner seemed to defy all restraint and mock at the disapproval of her friends. On these puzzles—to him, preoccupied as he was and little versed in such matters, they had seemed such—the present moment shed its light. He recalled, with understanding, things that had passed meaninglessly before his eyes, that he seemed to have forgotten altogether; the ambiguous things became plain; what had been, though plain, yet strange, fell into its ordered place and became natural. The new relation between them proclaimed itself the interpretation and the work of the bygone week.
Her glove lay in her lap, and he touched it lightly; the gesture speaking of their sudden new familiarity.
Her reproach was no less eloquent; she rebuked not the thing, but the rashness of it.
"Don't do that. They're looking," she found voice to whisper.
He withdrew his hand, and, taking off his hat, pushed the hair back from his forehead. Presently he looked at her with an almost comical air of perplexity; she was conscious of the glance, but she would not meet it. He pursed his lips to whistle.
"Don't," she whispered sharply. "Don't whistle." A whistle brought her husband to her mind.
The checked whistle rudely reflected his mingled feelings. He wished that he had been more on his guard—against her and against himself. There had been enough to put him on his guard; if he had been put on his guard, this thing need not have happened. He called the thing in his thoughts "inconvenient." He was marvellously awake to the inconvenience of it; it was that which came uppermost in his mind as he sat by Maggie Dennison. Yet, in spite of a phrase that sounded so cold and brutal, his reflections paid her no little compliment; for he called the revelation inconvenient all the more, and most of all, because he found it of immense interest, because it satisfied suddenly and to the full a sense of interest and expectation that had been upon him, because it seemed to make an immense change in his mind and to alter the conditions of his life. Had it not done all this, its inconvenience would have been much less—to him and save in so far as he grieved for her—nay, it would have been, in reality, nothing. It was inconvenient because it twisted his purposes, set him at jar with himself, and cut across the orderly lines he had laid down—and because, though it did all this, he was not grieved nor angry at it.
He rose to his feet. Mrs. Dennison looked up quickly.