Without words, they two regarded only each other. Quite still they stood, looking.
And as they looked, comrade spirits seemed to become visible in the glow of an incipient understanding. Beside her—faded in until to John it became as plain as her body—appeared a vision of loveliness and lure. Shy, yet unafraid, this vision beckoned him. From eyes bluer than the troubled deeps of the girl’s gaze, it smiled on him. With hair golden as the dreams of a child and tenuous as woman’s wiles, it awoke in him a thrill like that on seeing the home-land banner in foreign climes.
The while, in imagination, he heard the Spring Song of Mendelssohn, vaguely passionate, played by the pure-yearning notes of a flute. The fragrance that accompanies the aspirations of youth filled his nostrils. A thought of apple-blossoms hurt his mind with midsummer weariness.
From his heart, as if aroused by its increasing beat, uprose response to the vision. Not as if born of the moment—rather as if long protected from impious eyes—an emotion new to him seemed to take form. He felt that the girl, as well as he, must see and recognize.
Cruel with tenderness, eager with fear, the emotion that had arisen from his heart-beats passed, like a gallant shape, from him to her. In command that was, in truth, but a prayer, it faced the comrade soul of her.
For a moment and an age, the eyes of the financier and those of the shopgirl met and held, each pair the other. Met also, in that age of moment’s length, the lad Amor, a creature of the spirit whose first desire is to have and to hold, with Innocentia, one not more to cherish than to fear.
A low-voiced, fragmentary conversation recalled John to the more material present.
“You, Mary?”
“Who else? At your worst I wouldn’t dare to desert you.”
“Any more than I would you. If you hadn’t poured me so much of—— Anyhow I’ve done what you said I couldn’t do—put over a sweatshop fake that——”