Yet her soul was naked before him.
The truth was that he had read her purpose almost from the start.
For a short time, she had deceived him, when she entered his room. But one glance at her face, one touch of her hands, had instantly told him that she was neither cold nor exhausted. The snow on her coat had not been blown upon it by the wind. He suspected that she had rolled on the ground before knocking at his door.
The discovery had shaken him a little. Plunged always in his work, and with the natural modesty that was his strongest characteristic, he had never regarded her as more than a harmless flirt or possessed of any real feeling for him other than sincere friendliness. She had been an amusing little doll, though capable, now and then, of touching something in him which stirred him uneasily. He fully understood how great an influence she might have on other men; but the idea of anything bordering on an intrigue between them had never entered his head.
Then—suddenly—he found her in his room—the room she rightly described as bare, cold, priestly. She had talked to him intimately, of things he had kept locked away for twelve long, dreary years, lighting up the whole place with her dainty beauty, goading his starved, strictly disciplined soul into thoughts that had lain dormant for what seemed ages, feeding fires that he wanted to keep low, offering him all that Life might have given him, but had not given him, all that might have been and was not. For the past half-hour, there had been hot flames in his blood, fierce throbbings in his brain. She had undoubtedly melted the icicle as no woman had ever done since long, long ago.
She had hammered incessantly at his heart. But—this would have astonished her and crushed her had she only known it—the refrain which her hammering had brought into his head was, not her name, but this one, endlessly repeated:
"Frances! Frances! Frances!"
Always, over and over again, maddeningly:
"Frances!"
The sweet purity that he had lost was tearing at him——