“I think it capital,” she said. “I do not see how it can be improved. Will you let me take it home and consider it?”
“Of course,” he assented. “You know I do not pretend it is perfect. But it seems to me we risk nothing in trying it.”
Salome rose to go and reached out her hand for the manuscript. Some pieces had fallen on the table and in gathering them up, their hands brushed against each other.
An electric thrill shot through the frame of each. Salome stood, blushing and sweet, suddenly conscious that a crucial moment in her life had come. Had Villard but spoken, had he but clasped the hand that still remained near his!
But, ever depreciating himself and knowing absolutely nothing of the heart of woman, he turned abruptly away, bringing Salome back to herself with a hasty “good-evening.” And then he strode away to the outer air, asking himself, savagely, why he was so weak and boyish because a pretty woman happened to touch his hand.
XVI.
All through the winter months, Geoffrey Burnham and Marion Shaw were constantly meeting. As Burnham had intimated to Villard, he had taken only a superficial interest in the philanthropic or ethical side of mill-economy. But he was often at the Hall of an evening; and upon pleasant nights, when the ladies walked over from the Shepard mansion, he accompanied them home after the evening’s engagement. If it were early, as on ordinary occasions, he went in and sat chatting with them for an hour or two. Mrs. Soule always welcomed him, and although she never went to the Hall, she found ample opportunities of telling him how many lonely hours it caused her.
“I often wish Salome cared half as much,” she used plaintively to say on these occasions, “for a living aunt as for a dead grandfather.”
Often, Burnham sang to Salome’s accompaniment, his rich tenor voice lending pathos, and his ardent glances a meaning, for Marion in the love-songs he sang so well. The latter sat silent at such times, a quiet content wrapping her round, forgetting the past, ignoring the future.
“A blind man’s paradise,” she told herself it was, as the weeks rolled by, and the glamour of a scarcely hinted but very evident passion waited in vain for more than the vaguest expression.