“I offered it, and you refused it—on my account, you said! What a reason!” He repudiated it with a fierce head-shake. “When you are giving your brain, your strength, your life, why won’t you take that much from me?”
“‘Oh, it’s been wretched!’”
“Suppose I should?” She looked at him as if she half feared a recoil of his eagerness; but the blood, mounting to his face, only gave him a more headlong impetuousness. His answer was as direct as Holden could have made: “Is that yes?”
“Why not?” she faltered, her eyes full upon him.
“Good Lord!”—his voice was thick—“then there need be no end to anything!” He stooped with that incalculable impulse of his. She swayed away from him. Her black fan seemed to brush him back.
“’Sh!” her warning hand was on his.
Tall, slightly stooping, Charlie Thair stood between the potted palms, blinking at them out of his narrow eyes. One could not know how much they had seen. They seemed to have seen simply nothing.
“I have,” he murmured, “constituted myself a relief expedition. You did very well,” he said to Longacre. “I have spent three quarters of a waltz hunting.”
“I did the best I could.” Longacre’s cheerful impudence covered the situation. “You ought to give up sooner, old man.”