“Mrs. Lawless—Feather—I beg you will get up,” he said.
But she had reached the point of not caring what happened if she could keep him. He was a gentleman—he had everything in the world. What did it matter?
“I have no one but you and—and you always seemed to like me, I would do anything—anyone asked me, if they would take care of me. I have always liked you very much—and I did amuse you—didn’t I? You liked to come here.”
There was something poignant about her delicate distraught loveliness and, in the remoteness of his being, a shuddering knowledge that it was quite true that she would do anything for any man who would take care of her, produced an effect on him nothing else would have produced. Also a fantastic and finely ironic vision of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife rose before him and the vision of himself as Joseph irked a certain complexness of his mentality. Poignant as the thing was in its modern way, it was also faintly ridiculous.
Then Robin awakened and shrieked again. The sound which had gained strength through long sleep and also through added discomfort quite rang through the house. What that sound added to the moment he himself would not have been able to explain until long afterwards. But it singularly and impellingly added.
“Listen!” panted Feather. “She has begun again. And there is no one to go to her.”
“Get up, Mrs. Lawless,” he said. “Do I understand that you are willing that I should arrange this for you!”
He helped her to her feet.
“Do you mean—really!” she faltered. “Will you—will you—?”
Her uplifted eyes were like a young angel’s brimming with crystal drops which slipped—as a child’s tears slip—down her cheeks. She clasped her hands in exquisite appeal. He stood for a moment quite still, his mind fled far away and he forgot where he was. And because of this the little simpleton’s shallow discretion deserted her.