“Well, I suppose I must bid you good-bye. I hope you won’t be gone long.”
She held out her hand and Villard took it. A subtle fire shot from it straight to Villard’s heart. He looked up. Were her eyes, so soft and kind, suffused with tears? Was this the strong, self-reliant Salome?
“Miss Shepard, Salome,” he burst out, incoherently, “I——”
“Come right in this way,” said a hearty voice at the other door. “Villard will tell you what you want to know——”
“Good-bye,” said Salome again, in the most matter-of-fact tone, releasing her hand just in time, as the other superintendent ushered in a buyer from the west. “Good-bye and good luck;” and turning, she walked away with the nonchalant air which a woman knows so well how to assume, even at the most serious moment of her life.
Poor Villard was both confused and exalted by the sudden dawn of blessedness, which had as suddenly faded. He turned to the buyer but was incoherent, and gave wrong prices on the last shipment of cotton, so that his customer felt obliged to call him back to his senses by a not over-delicate allusion to the parting he was shrewd enough to guess he had interrupted.
Salome went home in a strangely depressed mood. She ate but little dinner, and excusing herself early in the evening on the plea of unusual weariness, she retired to her room, undressed and donned a silken night-wrapper, only to lie awake all night, worrying herself with fruitless questioning. In the watches of the night and under cover of the dark, she told herself that she had given her heart unsought; that had Villard loved her as she did him, nothing could have kept him from saying so; that she had been vain and conceited in fancying that, under his quiet demeanor, he loved her.
Then she remembered his sudden, yearning look when he had grasped her hand, and that, from the depths of his great, manly heart, he had called her “Salome.” And then, woman-like, she shed a few hot tears of gratitude and impatience.
Marion Shaw, meanwhile, had gone to the Hall alone that evening. Her work among the mill-girls had grown dearer to her heart with every month. Most of the girls loved her now, and looked upon her as a comrade, though walking on much higher ground than they. Many of them had secret aspirations to reach the standard of her ideals, as they dimly conceived it, and were the better for trying.
Marion had not had a long fight with herself when weeks had rolled into months, and she heard no word from Burnham.