Most of this Barry perceived in that curious, instinctive, intuitive manner with which one observes a thing without really looking at it. His whole mind was taken up with the girl who had started from her chair and was staring at him, a half-frightened, half-puzzled, wholly incomprehensible expression on her lovely face.
"Shirley!" he cried, springing forward impulsively. "You're all right? They haven't—hurt you in any way?"
To his amazement, she did not show the slightest sign of being glad to see him. On the contrary, she seemed almost frightened; and the quick backward step she took to place the table between them, no less than the look in her dark eyes, halted Lawrence in his tracks as effectually as a bullet might have done.
For a second he stood there staring at her, the color swiftly ebbing from his face.
"I don't—understand," he said at length, in a low, bewildered tone. "What is the matter? It isn't possible that you're—afraid of me?"
She moistened her lips and, putting out one hand, let the tips of her gloved fingers rest lightly on the table top. From the moment of his entrance her eyes had never left Barry's face, and now, as he saw them clearly in the lamplight, the look there was like the stab of a knife.
"I don't know," she said quietly; and Lawrence saw that it was the calmness of deliberate effort. "I don't think it's quite—that."
"But what is the matter? What has happened?" He flung out both hands in an eloquent gesture. "Why are you acting so strangely?" After all he had been through, after the strain and stress and mental suffering he had been laboring under, this frigid reception, so different from the one he had imagined when he dared to picture their meeting at all, was almost unnerving. "You must tell me what it means!" he cried.
Her lips quivered, but she caught them between her teeth and tilted her chin a little more. She still wore her hat—a wide one of black velvet, with curving brim and soft black plumes. Her sable coat was flung over the back of a nearby chair; and as she faced him—slim, erect, palpitating with life and charm and fascination, Lawrence realized that she had never seemed so beautiful—or so utterly beyond his reach.
"I think," she returned steadily, "that you are the one to tell me that."