Christian’s wide-open eyes continued to gaze up at her with that disconcerting look which had in it both remote abstraction and something very intimately personal. His glance expressed a tender pleasure as it maintained itself against hers.
“Oh, but I like it so very much!” he murmured, with a pleading smile.
Then, by a sudden movement, he sat up, flushing in a novel embarrassment. “I beg you to pardon me,” he urged, faltering over his words. “I was not wholly awake, I think; or I was trying to persuade myself that it was still a dream. Do not think me so rude, I pray you!”
She signified by a gesture and momentary facial relaxation that this particular detail of the situation need not detain them.
“But”—she began, in her stiffest and least amiable voice, and then hesitated. She put her knee again upon the chair, and, resting her hand on its back, looked dubiously at him. “I hardly know what to say,” she started once more, and stopped altogether.
“Oh, but it is I who must say everything,” he broke in, eagerly. “I am quite awake now—I see, of course, it is all absurd, meaningless in your eyes, till I explain it to you.” He rose to his feet and put forth his hand as if to offer it in greeting. No responsive token being visible on her set face, or in her rigid posture, as she confronted him, he waved both hands in a deprecatory movement over the table laden with flowers between them. “These are my peace-offering,” he said, with less confidence. “I hoped they would say some things for me—some things which I feel within me, and cannot easily put into speech. That is what I expected they would surely do. But”—he finished with dejection, after another glance into her face—“evidently they are as tongue-tied as I am. I see it was not a happy thought in me to bring them—or to come myself!”
She had followed his words with rapt attentiveness—but at the end seemed to remember only one of them. “The ‘thought,’” she said, coldly. “Yes, that is what I do not understand. What was the thought?”
He regarded her with some perplexity. “What was the thought—my thought?” he repeated. “Oh—since it does not explain itself, what good is there in talking about it? Let us say that there was no ‘thought’ at all. I will make my compliments and apologies—and say good-morning—and nothing at all will have happened.”
“No,” she answered reflectively. “That would be stupid. You have been to expense, and evidently to some inconvenience as well, to do this thing. On second thoughts,” she went on, with an apparent effort to modify the asperities of her tone and manner, “I dare say that I haven’t behaved quite nicely to you. If you remember, I told you a long time ago that bad manners was a failing of mine.”
“I remember every little word that you spoke,” said Christian softly.