"Then I'll have dinner ready for you!" she cried, as the hansom turned and disappeared down through the darkening mist, smiling to herself at the incongruousness of what she had said. It was only in fiction, she felt, that the opportune moment and the adequate word coincided.
But driving home through the gray evening air with the tears still wet on her lashes, she pondered over a new and perturbing and yet not altogether painful problem: Could it be that she had played her part with him too, too earnestly? Must she lose him now, when he meant so much to her?
CHAPTER XXV
TARNISHED GOLD
She yielded then where she had frowned,
And fell her tears like leaves;
She sank before him on the ground
And clasped his iron greaves.
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."
After all, Rabelais' religion and women are one and the same thing—a great Perhaps.—"The Silver Poppy."
The lights of Cordelia's little yellow-trimmed study were carefully shaded and softened. Cordelia herself, with bright but restless eyes, with a slightly flushed face, and a little quickness of speech and movement betokening, perhaps, nerves too tensely strung, was already waiting for Hartley, when, an hour later, he stepped up to her door.