Receiving permission, Eben turned his back and stooped to touch a match to the logs on the hearth. In a moment the flames were leaping and the man who had straightened up stood for a brief space watching them spread and broaden.
It was while he was so engaged that Conscience raised her hand and held out her glass, still not quite emptied, for Stuart to set down. She did so silently and the man rose from his chair and took it from her, but in the simple operation their fingers met and a sudden surging of emotions came to each in the moment of contact.
Without a word, save as his lips formed mutely the two syllables—"To you"—Stuart lifted the glass toward her and then drained it.
Then as he replaced it together with his own on the table Eben Tollman turned, and noted, with satisfaction, the emptiness of the miniature goblets.
The light of animation had died slowly from the dark eyes of the woman, until to the watching husband they seemed inky pools of languor. The leaping flames held her attention and her lips were parted in an inscrutable half-smile. Already her thoughts were becoming pleasantly languid, dwelling on such inconsequential things as how blue the water had been—and that after all to-morrow does not come—until to-morrow.
Shadows leaped and danced fantastically against the color of the crackling logs and in her hair shimmered a glow that ranged between the glint of darkened mahogany and jet. It was of this that Stuart thought, as, for a half hour, they listened to Tollman's talk, content with brief replies or none at all. Some magic had lulled him, too, into a quietened mood from which had been smoothed the saw-edged raggedness of despair. With a vague wonderment he recognized this metamorphosis. No such soothing potency lay in any wine ever pressed from the grapes of Funchal; but it was inexplicably pleasant, and surrender grew beyond any power of its questioning or combatting. Gradually, agreeably the two of them were sinking below the surface of consciousness. Soon they would be submerged.
Then in a moment of partial realization, Conscience said: "I think I had better go upstairs. I was almost napping in my chair." But she made no actual effort to move and her husband raised a smiling demurrer to the suggestion.
"It would be a pity to go just now. The fire has only begun to be cheerful and as for myself I am still chilly."
It was unaccountably pleasant there, with this strange, almost magical blurring of realities into a velvety ease ... with visions of blue water and contented thoughts hovering near in a waking and seductive sort of sleep.
A long silence fell upon the three—realized by only one.