He leaned a little closer to her. And he looked at her and looked at her and looked at her. At intervals his lips moved as if he were speaking, and yet he was thinking wordlessly. Leaning thus toward her, his gaze and attitude had all the intensity of one who watches a ninth-inning tie in the deciding game of a championship series. And as he looked and looked and looked, the fat man and his wife, quite unaware of their impalpability, also looked and looked and looked in grateful fascination.
“Did you——” Henry Millick Chester finally spoke these words in a voice he had borrowed, evidently from a stranger, for it did not fit his throat and was so deep that it disappeared—it seemed to fall down a coal-hole and ended in a dusty choke. “Did you——” he began again, two octaves higher, and immediately squeaked out. He said “Did you” five times before he subjugated the other two words.
“Did you—mean that?”
“What?” Her own voice was so low that he divined rather than heard what she said. He leaned even a little closer—and the fat man nudged his wife, who elbowed his thumb out of her side morbidly: she wasn’t missing anything.
“Did you—did you mean that?”
“Mean what?”
“That!”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“When you—when you—oh, you know!”
“No, I don’t.”