“Please don’t feel that it is difficult,” he said gently. “I think I know what you would ask. If you wish, I will put off my departure until Saturday. No, don’t thank me. I shall find my reward in the thought that—that”—
He hesitated, and she raised her face until their eyes met. He bent toward her.
“In the thought that you may realize how hard it is for me to let you go.”
He had taken both her hands, and the tears in her eyes made it well-nigh impossible for her to see how close his lips were to hers.
“You are a noble fellow,” she whispered.
Richard was torn with the tempest of love and desperation that filled his soul. The incense of her hair, the warm caress of her breath as it touched his face, the sad, white misery of her trembling lips seemed to madden him. He hesitated an instant, while the spirits of light and darkness warred within him. Then a strange thing happened. He heard, as though the speaker stood close to his ear, the ringing voice of the preacher who had stirred his soul amid the solemn shadows of a church some weeks before, and it seemed to say: “Be true to your manhood; for the light that is within you is divine.”
Richard turned on the instant, unconscious that his overwrought nerves had worked what seemed at the moment to be a miracle. White and trembling, he sank into the chair by the side of the sobbing woman, whose icy hand still rested wearily in his.
As he had turned, it had seemed to him that the portières at the end of the room were falling into place, as though they had been suddenly disturbed; but as he looked at them again, hanging heavy and quiet in the shadows, he felt that the fever that had caused him to hear a stranger’s voice had cast its delirious witchery upon his vision. But the truth was that his ears had played him false, while his eyes had not.