I turned on the last speaker, and my voice made him drop his lighted cigar on his complacent knuckles.
"I never knew a man," I exclaimed, "who had better reasons for wanting to live!"
A handsome youth mused: "Yes, his wife is very beautiful—but it doesn't follow—"
And then some one nudged him, for they knew I was Halidon's friend.
THE PRETEXT
I
MRS. RANSOM, when the front door had closed on her visitor, passed with a spring from the drawing-room to the narrow hall, and thence up the narrow stairs to her bedroom.
Though slender, and still light of foot, she did not always move so quickly: hitherto, in her life, there had not been much to hurry for, save the recurring domestic tasks that compel haste without fostering elasticity; but some impetus of youth revived, communicated to her by her talk with Guy Dawnish, now found expression in her girlish flight upstairs, her girlish impatience to bolt herself into her room with her throbs and her blushes.
Her blushes? Was she really blushing?