He shook his head. Her hand lay on the log beside him, and his own closed over it. As it did so, she contrasted its hardened palm with the smooth surface of Dudley Webb's. The contrast touched her, and, with a swift, warm gesture, she raised the clasped hands to her cheek.
"I told you once I liked your hand," she said. "Well—I love it."
He turned upon her a hungry glance.
"I would work it to the bone for you," he answered. "But—it is long to wait."
"Yes, it is long to wait," she repeated, but her tone had not the heaviness of his. Waiting in its wider sense means little to a woman—and in a moment she cheerfully returned to a prophetic future.
A few days later Bernard came, and she saw Nicholas less often. Her affection for her brother, belonging, as it did, to the dominant family feeling which possessed her soul, was filled with an almost maternal solicitude. He absorbed her with a spasmodic, half selfish, wholly insistent appeal. She received his confidences, wrote his letters, and tied his cravats. Upon his last visit home he had spent the greater part of his time in Kingsborough; now he rode in seldom, and invariably returned in a moody and depressed condition.
"You're worth the whole bunch of them," he had said to her of other girls, "you dear old Eugie."
And she had warmed and laid a faithful hand on his arm. It was characteristic of her that no call for affection went disregarded—that the sensitive fibres of her nature quivered beneath any caressing hand.
"Do you really like me best?" she asked.
"Don't I?" He laughed his impulsive, boyish laugh—"I'll prove it by letting you go in for the mail this afternoon. I detest Kingsborough!"