"Was I late?" she returned. "I did n't mean to be; but let us walk further on. We can talk as we go."
As she caught sight of the eager light in his eyes and noted the intonation of his voice, she divined that his mood was radically different from that which had carried him to her house in hot haste a few mornings before. Then, he was burning with a sense of humiliation, frantic with the thought that she was slipping from his grasp, embittered by baffled ambition, and determined to assert his rights. Now, softer emotions held sway in his heart. The memory of that scene in the opera house had grown less galling. He was soothed by the blandishments of resilient self-esteem and by his friends' more flattering interpretation of the incident. Indeed, looked at from one perspective, it was a most impressive vindication of his official dignity against the slight that had been put upon it. A new point of view had somehow sprung from his brief contact with the President. For the first time, Cobbens and his kind appeared to him the provincials they were. They no longer blocked his whole horizon, like the lion in the way. Dim dreams of wider ambitions, vague exhilarations, stirred within him. He began to think it possible to transcend Warwick. Thus his temper was less bitter than before, his poise was less a pose, the result of a new adjustment of values.
"Felicity," he began, almost happily, "I could n't help thinking, as I stood there waiting for you, how often I have waited in the same way before. Just think of it, Felicity, for years and years! It seems almost a lifetime, so much has happened in the interval. Did you notice this coat and cap? They 're the same I used to wear when you began to take my car rather than any other. A pretty good disguise for the mayor of Warwick, don't you think?"
A pain went through her heart, not for a lost love, but for the vanished dreams of girlhood. The chord he had hoped to touch remained mute. In view of the fact that she believed love to be dead between them, this method of stimulating an outworn romance seemed sentimental and insincere. Had he loved her, she might well have thought it boyish and pathetic. What he spoke of as a disguise had seemed so natural as to escape her notice; and this indicated the height from which she had never really descended and could now never descend. He had lost his great opportunity of appearing the mayor in her eyes. It was no part of her plan, however, to emphasise this difference between them, for she had seen what vindictive passions a realisation of the fact might arouse within him. Full of the warmth of his own emotions, he failed to grasp the significance of her unresponsiveness.
"But have you spoken to the bishop yet, as you promised to?" he asked eagerly.
"No, I have n't—I could n't, yet."
"I 'm glad of it," he returned buoyantly. "I wanted another chance to see you before you spoke to him, to set myself right with you. I did n't mean to threaten you, Felicity. I knew that was no way to win forgiveness, but I was n't myself. Can't you see how the long waiting for you almost drove me mad? But now we 're together again in the old way, and I feel that I can explain everything so that you can understand. Everything that's happened lately to keep us apart seems a dream, something utterly unreal. Come, Felicity, don't you think our meeting was rather a cold one, after such a long separation? Have n't I won the prize you set for me to win, and are you going to deny me my reward?" He made as if he would put his arm about her, but she shrank away with such emphatic and spontaneous denial that he desisted in chagrin. "After all there has been between us," he protested, "are you going to let a passing flirtation outweigh the fact that we are man and wife?"
Felicity had somehow not anticipated that he would attempt to kiss her, and the movement set her quivering as at an outrage.
"Has there really been so much between us, Tom?" she asked. "Doesn't it all seem a great mistake, which it would be better to acknowledge frankly, rather than to assume the existence of something that has ceased to exist?"
"And whose mistake was it?" he demanded, with sudden fierceness. "Tell me that."