“Why certainly,” he assented, amiably, as he stood looking down at her. “The more there is of it, the better—if it comes naturally, and people know enough to understand that it is moonshine, and isn't the be-all and end-all of everything.”
“There's a lover for you!” Miss Madden cried, with mirth and derision mingled in her laugh.
“Don't you worry about me,” he told her. “I'm a good enough lover, all right. And when you come to that, if Edith is satisfied, I don't precisely see what——”
“What business it is of mine?” she finished the sentence for him. “You're entirely right. As you say, IF she's satisfied, no one else has anything to do with it.”
“But have you got any right to assume that she isn't satisfied?” he asked her with swift directness—“or any reason for supposing it?”
Miss Madden shook her head, but the negation seemed qualified by the whimsical smile she gave him. “None whatever,” she said—and on the instant the talk was extinguished by the entrance of Lady Cressage.
Thorpe's vision was flooded with the perception of his rare fortune as he went to meet her. He took the hand she offered, and looked into the smile of her greeting, and could say nothing. Her beauty had gathered to it new forces in his eyes—forces which dazzled and troubled his glance. The thought that this exquisite being—this ineffable compound of feeling and fine nerves and sweet wisdom and wit and loveliness—belonged to him seemed too vast for the capacity of his mind. He could not keep himself from trembling a little, and from diverting to a screen beyond her shoulder a gaze which he felt to be overtly dimmed and embarrassed.
“I have kept you waiting,” she murmured.
The soft sound of her voice came to his ears as from a distance. It bore an unfamiliar note, upon the strangeness of which he dwelt for a detached instant. Then its meaning broke in upon his consciousness from all sides, and lighted up his heavy face with the glow of a conqueror's self-centred smile. He bent his eyes upon her, and noted with a controlled exaltation how her glance in turn deferred to his, and fluttered beneath it, and shrank away. He squared his big shoulders and lifted his head. Still holding her jewelled hand in his, he turned and led her toward the sofa. Halting, he bowed with an exaggerated genuflection and flourish of his free hand to Miss Madden, the while he flashed at her a glance at once of challenge and of deprecation. Through the sensitized contact of the other hand, he felt that the woman he held bowed also, and in his own spirit of confused defiance and entreaty. The laugh he gave then seemed to dispel the awkwardness which had momentarily hung over the mocking salutation.
Miss Madden laughed too. “Oh, I surrender,” she said. “You drag congratulations from me.”