"Your ... home?"
"Jane is away," he said briefly.
The shades were pulled down carefully, a light lit. She sat, her eyes wide, on the hall couch, adjusting her skirts in the light. The dull gray paper brought out all of her ripe rosy loveliness; he paused, struck by the picture.... It was the couch on which he had last seen Jane sitting; a sardonic inner smile disturbed him.
"I don't feel that this is right, Pell—in her house——" Her deep eyes puckered in uncertainty.
Dominant lips closed her protest; she rested for a fleeting moment against him.
On the steps' landing he paused to point out tennis trophies gleaming against the dark woodwork.
Then they turned again, hand in hand, up the carpeted rounds to the dim silence above....
Before midnight he told her good-bye on the Hasson porch.
There were times, in the two weeks which followed, when Pelham viewed himself from without, with a definite disgust; when he realized that a furtive fraction of love could never make up for the big gap caused in the day's doings by the absence of Jane. Once Louise had to tease him out of this mood.
"I'm leaving you, Mr. Lover, on Wednesday.... Make my last three days pleasant."