“I wish you would shout,” she said.
“Very well,” he said, and going over to the door, he called out several times with the full power of his lungs. The sound, pent in that narrow room, fairly crashed in their ears, but there was no answer from without.
“Don’t do it again,” she said at last. Then she sighed. “Oh, the irony of it!” she exclaimed.
“I know.” He laughed. “But don’t give up, Girl. We’ll deliver those papers yet.”
“I will not give up,” she said, gravely. “But tell me, how did you get the papers?”
Orme began the story of the afternoon’s adventures.
“Why don’t you sit down?” she asked.
“Why”—he stammered—“I——”
He had been so conscious of his feeling toward her, so conscious of the fact that the one woman in all the world was locked in here alone with him, that since he arranged her seat he had not trusted himself to be near her. And she did not seem to understand.
She wished him to sit beside her, not knowing that he felt the almost overpowering impulse to take her in his arms and crush her close to him. That desire would have been more easily controlled, had he not begun to believe that she in some degree returned his feeling for her. If they escaped from this black prison, he would rest happy in the faith that her affection for him, now, as he supposed so largely friendly, would ripen into a glorious and compelling love. But it would not be right for him to presume—to take advantage of a moment in which she might think that she cared for him more than she actually did. Then, too, he already foresaw vaguely the possible necessity for an act which would make it best that she should not hold him too dear. So long he stood silent that she spoke again.