"Why didn't you come?" she repeated, looking down as though half ashamed of a weakness she could not conceal.
"Upon my honor," he laughed back at her, "I don't believe I should have appeared within a month if it hadn't been for your message."
"How could you!" she said reprovingly.
"Well, a madness for work got hold of me, and I was up in the clouds. I always have to gallop through things—that's why I didn't want to break into the mood while it lasted."
"And it lasted?"
"Yes, until your wire came. Then I dropped down, I don't know how, with a bump. It confronted me with the fact that I was still a human being; it revitalized me, as it were, and reminded me that the softest voice in all the world had been calling for me, and the sweetest eyes in all the world had been looking for me."
Cordelia shrank back from him; he thought for a moment that he had wounded her. The widened pupils of her eyes had grown smaller again, and the shadow of something fugitive and far away flitted across her face. Was she, he wondered, still so afraid of love?
"Then, you didn't finish the story?" she asked diffidently. It seemed the first time that she had shown a desire to repel him.
He had stepped closer to her, warm with a feeling he tried neither to fathom nor withhold. At this change in her he stopped short, bewildered.
"No." He tried to explain to her. "You said that I must come."