It was that man’s look which makes a woman’s heart beat faster, even if she is as inexperienced as Lydia. She was already tingling with an undefined emotion, and the shock of their meeting eyes made her face glow. It shone through the half-light as though a lamp had been lighted within.
They stood silently waiting for the car which flashed a headlight toward them far down the track. As it drew near, bounding over the rails, humming like a great insect, and bringing visibly nearer and nearer the end of their time together, Lydia was aware that Rankin was in the grasp of an emotion that threatened to become articulate. The steady advance of the car was forcing him to a speech against which he struggled in vain. Lydia began to quiver. She felt an expectancy of something lovely, moving, new to her, which grew tenser and tenser, as though her nerves were the strings of an instrument being pulled into tune for a melody. Standing there in the cold, rainy twilight, she had a moment of the exultation she had thought was to be so common in her Endbury career. She felt warmed through with the consciousness of being lovely, admired, secure, supremely fortunate, just as she had thought she would feel; but she had not been able to imagine the extraordinary happiness that this, or some unrecognized element of the moment, gave to her.
The car was almost upon them; the blinding glare of the headlight showed their faces with startling suddenness. She saw in Rankin’s eyes a tenderness that went to her heart. She leaned to him from the steps of the car to which he swung her—she leaned to him with a sweet, unconscious eagerness. In the instant before the car moved forward, as he stood gazing up at her, he spoke at last.
The words hummed meaningless in Lydia’s ears, and it was not until some time after, in the garish white brilliance of the car, that she convinced herself that she had heard aright. Even then, though she still saw his face raised to hers, the raindrops glistening on his hair and beard, even though she still heard the fervor of his voice, she remained incredulous before the enigma of his totally unexpected words. He had said, with a solemn note of pity in his voice: “Ah, my poor child, I am so horribly, horribly sorry for you!”
CHAPTER VIII
THE SHADOW OF THE COMING EVENT
Judge Emery looked tired and old as he sat down heavily at his dinner-table opposite his pretty daughter. The discomfort and irregularity of the household for the last two weeks had worn on the nerves of a very busy man who needed all of his strength for his work. It seemed an evil fate of his, he reflected as he took his napkin out of its ring, that whenever he was particularly hard-pressed in his profession, domestic turmoil was sure to set in. He was now presiding over a suit between the city and the electric railway company, involving many intricate details of electrical engineering and accounting methods. Until that suit was settled, he felt that it was unreasonable for his family to expect him to give time or attention to anything else.
In the absence of other vital interests in his life, he had come to focus all his faculties on his profession. On the adroitness of clever attorneys he expended the capacity for admiration which, as his life was arranged, found no other outlet; and, belonging to the generation before golf and bridge and tennis had brought games within the range of serious-minded adults, he had the same intent curiosity about the outcome of a legal contest that another man might have felt in the outcome of a Newport tournament. His wife had long ago learned, so she said, that any attempt to catch his mental eye while an interesting trial was in progress was as unavailing as to try to call a street gamin away from a knot-hole in a fence around a baseball field.