The door creaked. When he saw them, their bodies were still close together, but as they turned to glance across their shoulders their heads had drawn a little apart. Her hands, resting on the keyboard, were held captive by the man’s. Candles, flickering behind their heads, scorched a hole in the dusk to frame them.
The man’s face was boyish and clean-shaven, self-indulgent and almost handsome. It was a pleasant face: the corners of the mouth turned up with a hint of humor; the lips were full and kind; the eyes blue and impatient His complexion was high and his hair flaxen; his bearing sensitive and a little self-conscious. He was a man who could give himself excessively to any one he loved and who consequently would be always encountering new disappointments.
And the woman—she was like her voice: remote and passionate; haunting and unsatisfying; an instrument of romance for the awakening of idealized desires. She was fashioned no less for the attracting of love than for its repulse. Her forehead was intensely white; her brows were like the shadow of wings, hovering and poised; her eyes now vague as a sea-cloud, now flashing like sudden gleams of blue-gray sunlight Her hair was the color of ancient bronze—dark in the hollows and burnished at the edges. Her throat was her glory—full and young, throbbing like a bird’s and slender as the stalk of a flower. It was her mouth that gave the key to her character. It could be any shape that an emotion made it: petulant and unreasonable; kind and gracious and adoring. She was a darkened house when she was unresponsive; there was no stir in her—she seemed uninhabited. In the street below her windows some chance traveler of thought or affection halted; instantly all her windows blazed and the people of her soul gazed out.
The odd little figure, hesitating in the doorway, had worked this miracle. Her eyes, which had been troubled when first they rested on him, brightened. Her lips relaxed. Like a bubble rising from a still depth, laughter rippled up her throat and broke across the scarlet threshold of her mouth.
“Oh, Hal, what a darling! Where did you get him? And what a dear, funny nightgown!”
She tore her hands free from the man’s. Running to the little boy, she knelt beside him, bringing her face down to his level. As if to prevent him from escaping, she looped her arms about his neck.
“You are dear and funny,” she said. “Where d’you come from?”
Teddy was abashed. He didn’t mind being called dear, but he strongly objected to being called funny. He was terribly conscious of the pink flannel garment which clothed him. It hung like a sack from his narrow shoulders. If Mrs. Sheerug hadn’t safety-pinned a reef in at the neck, there would have been danger of its slipping off him. He couldn’t see his hands; they only reached to where his elbows ought to have been. He couldn’t see his feet; a yard of pink stuff draped them. He had had to kilt it to make his way along the passage. But the garment’s chief offense, as he regarded it, was that it was a woman’s: a rather stout middle-aged woman’s—the sort of woman who had given up trying to look pretty and probably wore a nightcap. Teddy forgot that had he not been press-ganged into sickness, the beautiful lady’s arms would not have been about him. All he remembered was that he looked a caricature at a moment when—he scarcely knew why—he wanted to appear most manly. Mrs. Sheerug was responsible and he felt hotly resentful.
“Where did you come from?”
“Bed.”