AN ADVANCE AND A RETREAT
It was the day after this, while Laura was still in Kemper's thoughts, that he ran across her as she came out of a church in Twenty-ninth Street. At the first glance she appeared a little startled, but the disturbance was so slight that it passed swift as a shadow across her face, and the next instant the illumining smile which he had thought of as her one memorable beauty shone from her eyes and lips.
"At first I hardly recognised you," she explained, "you don't look quite as I remembered you."
His amused glance lingered upon her face. "So you did remember me?" he said and the retort was so characteristic of the man that Gerty Bridewell would have paused waiting for it after she had spoken. If there was the smallest loophole apparent in the conversation through which the personal intention might be made to enter, he took to it as instinctively as the fox takes to the covert. The mere uttered words were what he might have responded to any woman who unconsciously gave him the opportunity, yet as he looked down upon Laura, in her velvet hat and black furs, at his side, he was filled with amazement at the interest aroused in him by her slender, though delicately suggestive figure. He felt the magnetic touch of her through the very flutter of her skirts—felt the fervour of her soul, the warmth of her personality, and he found himself attracted by her as by the mystery of a bright and distant flame. The intensity of life—the radiant energy of intellect—was in her look, in her voice, in her smile—and he knew instinctively that she was capable of larger issues—of higher heights and deeper depths—than any woman he had ever known. She puzzled him into a sympathy which quickened with each fresh instant of uncertainty, and it seemed to him, while she moved by his side, that the illusion of mystery was the one perennial charm a woman could possess—a mystery which lay not only in the flame and shadow of her expression, but in the intenser irregularities of her profile, in the curved darkness of her eyebrows, in the fulness of her mouth, in the profound eloquence of her eyes, in the pale amber of her skin, which was like porcelain touched by a flame, in her gestures, in her walk, in her delicate bosom and slender swaying hips, in her voice, her hands, her words, and in the blackness of her abundant hair braided low upon the nape of her slender neck. And this illusion—stronger than the illusion of beauty because more subtle, more tantalisingly inexplicable, caught and held his attention with a vivid and irresistible appeal.
At his words she had turned toward him with an animated gesture, while her hand in its white glove slipped from the large muff she held.
"It would be a poor memory that could not hold three days," she laughed.
"Three days?" He raised his eyebrows with a blithe interrogation which lent a peculiar charm to his expression. "Why, I thought that I had known you forever!"
She shook her head in a merry protest, though she felt herself flush slowly under the gay deference in his eyes.
"Forever is a long day. There are few people that it pays to know forever."
"And how do you know that you are not one of them—for me?" he asked.