"Because, Lou, you are just all the world to me—and a man must feel a little afraid when he thinks he may lose the world."
"Not me, Luke," she said, "you would not lose me—whatever happened."
"Let me get you a cab."
He was English, you see, and could not manage to say anything just then. The floodgates of sentiment might burst asunder now with the slightest word uttered that was not strictly commonplace. Louisa understood, else she had not loved him as she did. It never occurred to her to think that he was indifferent. Nay more! his sudden transition from sentiment to the calling of a cab—from sentiment to the trivialities of life pleased her in its very essence of incongruity.
"I said I would walk," she reminded him, smiling.
Then she gave him her hand. It was still gloveless and he took it in his, turning the palm upward so that he might bury his lips in its delicately perfumed depths. His kiss almost scalded her flesh, his lips were burning hot. Passion held in check will consume with inward fire, whilst its expression often cools like the Nereid's embrace.
He went to the door with her and watched her slender, trim figure walking rapidly away until it disappeared round the corner of the Square.
When he turned back into the hall, he found himself face to face with Lord Radclyffe. Not Uncle Rad—but an altogether different man, an old man now with the cynical lines round the mouth accentuated and deepened into furrows, the eyes hollow and colourless, the shoulders bent as if under an unbearable load.
"Uncle Rad," said Luke speaking very gently, forcing his voice to betray nothing of anxiety or surprise, "can I do anything for you?"
But even at sight of his nephew, of the man who had hitherto always succeeded in dissipating by his very presence every cloud on the misanthrope's brow, even at sight of him Lord Radclyffe seemed to shrink within himself, his face became almost ashen in its pallor, and lines of cruel hardness quite disfigured his mouth.