She covered her face with her hands. “O George, George!” she cried.
“He will follow you, of course. He will not let you go so easily.”
“Possibly; but I have begged him solemnly to let me take my way. Roger is not one to rave and rage. At all events, I shall refuse to see him now. A year hence I will think of it. His great desire will be, of course, that I don’t suffer. I shall not suffer.”
“By Jove, not if I can help it!” cried Fenton, with warmth. Nora answered with a faint, grave smile, and stood looking at him in appealing silence. He colored beneath her glance with the pressure of his thoughts. They resolved themselves chiefly into the recurring question, “What can be made of it?” While he was awaiting inspiration, he took refuge in a somewhat inexpensive piece of gallantry. “By the way, you must be hungry.”
“No, I am not hungry,” said Nora, “but I am tired. You must find me a lodging,—in some quiet hotel.”
“O, you shall be quiet enough,” he answered; but he insisted that unless, meanwhile, she took some dinner, he should have her ill on his hands. They quitted the office, and he hailed a hack, which drove them over to the upper Broadway region, where they were soon established in a well-appointed restaurant. They made, however, no very hearty meal. Nora’s hunger of the morning had passed away in fever, and Fenton himself was, as he would have expressed it, off his feed. Nora’s head had begun to ache; she had removed her bonnet, and sat facing him at their small table, leaning wearily against the wall, her plate neglected, her arms folded, her bright expanded eyes consulting the uncertain future. He noted narrowly how much prettier she was; but more even than by her prettiness he was struck by her high spirit. This belonged to an order of things in which he felt no commission to dabble; but in a creature of another sort he was free to admire such a luxury of conscience. In man or woman the capacity then and there to act was the thing he most relished. Nora had not faltered and wavered; she had chosen, and here she sat. It was an irritation to him to feel that he was not the manner of man for whom such a girl would burn her ships; for, as he looked askance at her beautiful absent eyes, he more than suspected that there was a positive as well as a negative side to her refusal of her friend. Poor Roger had a happier counterpart. It was love, and not indifference, that had pulled the wires of her adventure. Fenton, as we have intimated, was one who, when it suited him, could ride rough-shod to his mark. “You have told me half your story,” he said, “but your eyes tell the rest. You’ll not be Roger’s wife, but you’ll not die an old maid.”
Nora blushed, but she answered simply, “Please don’t say that.”
“My dear girl,” he said, “I religiously respect your secrets.” But, in truth, he only half respected them. Stirred as he was by her beauty and by that sense of feminine appealingness which may be an inspiring motive even to a very shabby fellow, he was keenly mortified by feeling that her tenderness passed him by, barely touching him with the hem of its garment. She was doing mighty fine things, but she was using him, her hard, vulgar cousin, as a senseless stepping-stone. These reflections quickened his appreciation of her charm, but took the edge from his delicacy. As they rose to go, Nora, who in spite of her absent eyes had watched him well, felt that cousinship had melted to a mere name. George had been to her maturer vision a painful disappointment. His face, from the moment of their meeting, had given her warning to withdraw her trust. Was it she or he who had changed since that fervid youthful parting of sixteen months before? She, in the interval, had been refined by life; he had been vulgarized. She had seen the world; she had known better things and better men; she had known Hubert, and, more than ever, she had known Roger. But as she drew on her gloves she reflected with horror that distress was making her fastidious. She wished to be coarse and careless; she wished that she might have eaten a heavy dinner, that she might enjoy taking George’s arm. And the slower flowed the current of her confidence, the softer dropped her words. “Now, dear George,” she said, with a desperate attempt at a cheerful smile, “let me know where you mean to take me.”
“Upon my soul, Nora,” he said, with a hard grin, “I feel as if I had a jewel I must lay in soft cotton. The thing is to find it soft enough.” George himself, perhaps, she might endure; but she had a growing horror of his friends. Among them, probably, were the female correlatives of the “parties” who had come to chat with Mr. Franks. She prayed he might not treat her to company. “You see I want to do the pretty thing,” he went on. “I want to treat you, by Jove, as I would treat a queen! I can’t thrust you all alone into an hotel, and I can’t put up at one with you,—can I?”
“I am not in a position to be fastidious,” said Nora. “I shall not object to going alone.”