“There’s the glove on it,” he said in a shaking voice. “What harm in my holding your glove? Don’t think of it, and talk to me. I love music, but no music is like your voice.”
“You go on Monday?”
It was her lips spoke the sentence, not she.
“No, on Tuesday—I think.”
“My—Mr. Widdowson is going to take me away from London.”
“Away?”
She told him the circumstances. Bevis kept his eyes upon her face, with a look of rapt adoration which turned at length to pain and woeful perplexity.
“You have been married a year,” he murmured. “Oh, if I had met you before that! What a cruel fate that we should know each other only when there was no hope!”
The man revealed himself in this dolorous sentimentality. His wonted blitheness and facetiousness, his healthy features, his supple, well-built frame, suggested that when love awoke within him he would express it with virile force. But he trembled and blushed like a young girl, and his accents fell at last into a melodious whining.
He raised the gloved fingers to his lips. Monica bent her face away, deadly pale, with closed eyes.