Mrs. Long had entered the house by a side door, and having met no servant before reaching the drawing-room, was unprepared for finding any one there. From the door she could see John, but could not see me, except in the long mirror, to which she did not raise her eyes, but in which I saw her swift movement, her outstretched hands, her look of unspeakable gladness. In less than a second, however, she had seen me, and with no perceptible change of manner had come rapidly towards me, holding out her left hand familiarly to him, as she passed him. Emma Long was not a hypocrite at heart, but she had an almost superhuman power of acting. It was all lost upon me, however, on that occasion. I observed the quick motion with which John thrust into a compartment of the desk, the sheet on which he had been writing; I observed the clasp of their hands as she glided by him; I observed her face; I observed his; and I knew as I had never fully known before how intensely they loved each other.
My resolution was taken. Cost what it might, come what might, I would speak fully and frankly to my sister the next day. I would not longer stand by and see this thing go on. At that moment I hated both John Gray and Emma Long. No possible pain to Ellen seemed to me to weigh for a moment against my impulse to part them.
I could not talk. I availed myself of the freedom warranted by the intimacy between the families, and continued to seem absorbed in my book. But I lost no word, no look, which passed between the two who sat opposite me. I never saw Emma Long look so nearly beautiful as she did that night. She wore a black velvet dress, with fine white lace ruffles at the throat and wrists. Her hair was fair, and her complexion of that soft pale tint, with a slight undertone of brown in it, which is at once fair and warm, and which can kindle in moments of excitement into a brilliance far outshining any brunette skin. She talked rapidly with much gesture. She was giving John an account of the stupidity of the people with whom she had been dining. Her imitative faculty amounted almost to genius. No smallest peculiarity of manner or speech escaped her, and she could become a dozen different persons in a minute. John laughed as he listened, but not so heartily as he was wont to laugh at her humorous sayings. He had been too deeply stirred in the long interval of solitude before she returned. His cheeks were flushed and his voice unsteady. She soon felt the effect of his manner, and her gayety died away; before long they were sitting in silence, each looking at the fire. I knew I ought to make the proposition to go home, but I seemed under a spell; I was conscious of a morbid desire to watch and wait. At length Mrs. Long rose, saying,--
"If it will not disturb Sally's reading, I will play for you a lovely little thing I learned yesterday."
"Oh, no," said I. "But we must go as soon as I finish this chapter."
She passed into the music-room and looked back for John to follow her; but he threw himself at full length on the sofa, and said,--
"No, I will listen here."
My quickened instinct saw that he dared not go; also that he had laid his cheek in an abandonment of ecstasy on the arm of the sofa on which her hand had been resting. Even in that moment I had a sharp pang of pity for him, and the same old misgiving of question, whether my good and sweet and almost faultless Ellen could be loved just in the same way in which Emma Long would be!
As soon as she had finished the nocturne, a sad, low sweet strain, she came back to the parlor. Not even for the pleasure of giving John the delight of the music he loved would she stay where she could not see his face.
But I had already put down my book, and was ready to go. Our good-nights were short and more formal than usual. All three were conscious of an undefined constraint in the air. Mrs. Long glanced up uneasily in John's face as we left the room. Her eyes were unutterably tender and childlike when a look of grieved perplexity shadowed them. Again my heart ached for her and for him. This was no idle caprice, no mere entanglement of senses between two unemployed and unprincipled hearts. It was a subtle harmony, organic, spiritual, intellectual, between two susceptible and intense natures. The bond was as natural and inevitable as any other fact of nature. And in this very fact lay the terrible danger.