Wilmot took one slow step toward the famous sculptor, then smiled, picked up the fellow's pipe, and returned it to him. "I saw you put it down just before you left," he said. "I think there is nothing else you have forgotten, is there? If there is I think it will be best not to come back for it until I have gone. Meanwhile you will have time to shave and bathe and make yourself presentable."
Scupper, sure that he was not actually going to be hit, escaped with an ease and jauntiness which he was far from feeling. And Barbara, the high tension relieved, burst out laughing.
It was Wilmot's turn to look sullen. He had felt that the sheer animal force of his love was holding and even moulding Barbara to his will, as no tenderness and delicacy had ever done. But at the sculptor's entrance, the honest if brutal cave-man had fled, like some noble savage before a talking-machine, and left in a state of civilized helplessness a young gentleman who could not find anything to say for himself.
As for Barbara, she had never seen Wilmot look as he had looked, or heard those quivering, broken tones in his voice. The savage in her had gone out to him with open arms and, behold, the primal force which, standing like an island of refuge in a sea of doubt, she had been about to clasp was but an empty shadow. That Wilmot had not done very nobly with his talents, that there were weaknesses in his character and record, things even that needed explaining, had not at the moment of his mastery mattered to her a jot. But now such thoughts flocked to her like birds to a tree; and she was glad that she had escaped from a situation that had so nearly overwhelmed her reason and drowned her common sense in the heavenly sweetness of surrender.
Wilmot could find nothing to say. It was no mere gust of passion that had swept over him, but a storm. He was physically tired, as if he had rowed a long race. He no longer wished to play the master. He would rather a thousand times have rested his hot forehead on Barbara's cool hand, and fallen quietly asleep like a little child come in at last to his mother after too much play in the hot sun.
"Life," he said at last, "is a nuisance, Barbs. Isn't it? Would you, honestly, be happier if I disappeared, and never bothered you again? Sometimes I feel that I ought to."
She shook her head. "If you like people," she said, "you like them, faults and all. I'm dependent on you in a hundred ways. You're the oldest and best friend I've got. If you disappeared I'd curl up and die. But now that we are talking personalities, you very nearly forgot yourself a few minutes ago. Well, I forgive. But it mustn't happen again."
He bowed his head very humbly. "I will go back to patience and gentleness," he said, "and give them another trial."
"I wish," she said, "that you would go back and begin your life over again--stop drifting and sail for some definite harbor."
"I will," he said, "on condition--"