For one wavering moment she let her eyes lose their studied calmness, and, inwardly surrendering, gazed at him recklessly, abandonedly, with her very soul in her face.
“Is it safe here?” she murmured, as she drew her chair up.
He nodded. “As safe as anywhere,” he was on the point of replying, but did not speak the words.
“Dearest!” she whispered to him, with her eyes still on his face, and her back to the crowded room.
He tried to seize her ungloved hand in his, but she drew him up with a sudden monitory “Hsssssh!” Then he, too, remembered, and they took up their rôle of outward indifference once more.
“I had to come back, you see!” she confessed, with what seemed a shamed and mournful shake of the head.
“Something told me you would, all along, even after your first letter. I saw it, as surely as I see you now!”
“Oh, Jim, what I wrote you was true!—it showed me that we can’t bury our past, in a day, or a week or a month! It’s made me afraid of myself and taught me how weak I am!”
And again she looked at him, across the quiet but abysmal gulf of her reawakening despair.
“But there is just where we make ourselves so unhappy—we’re so afraid about being afraid! Life without some fear—what is it?”