She kissed him timidly. As it was her first kiss he may be excused, poor fellow, for thinking that the shy caress was merely something on account. Being shy himself where women were concerned, he accepted it gratefully, and with a restraint which made Cicely heartily ashamed of herself. He watched her fingers softly stroking the pearls, and wondered why she remained so silent. And all the time she was thinking miserably: “This is my price, or part of it. I am selling myself to this gallant gentleman. If he knew it. . . .!” The tiara would go admirably with these pearls. And whenever she wore them, the same thought would spoil all pleasure in them. Unconsciously she sighed.
“Why do you sigh?” he asked.
It was an unfortunate question at such a moment. Swiftly she divined that he was the sort of man who put such questions and expected them to be answered truthfully. If she let this minute pass, always she must dissemble, become an actress for ever and ever. And she couldn’t do it.
Hanging, so it seemed to her, between heaven and hell, she glanced up and saw her stern father staring down at her. On his familiar face she read contempt, condemnation, derision. The Danecourt half of her withered.
Nevertheless, so persistently does moss cling to us, that she might have procrastinated, if sudden passion had not broken loose in Wilverley. The soft sigh inflamed him. He became, what he wanted to be, the lover of romance. It is invariably your shy man who, on occasion, bursts out of his fetters. He misinterpreted the sigh and the silence that followed it. He jumped to the conclusion that the awakening he had predicted was at hand. He would exercise the supreme privilege of the male, and infuse into this sweet, trembling creature the ardour that informed him so ecstatically. Without warning, his strong arms crushed her against his broad chest; he kissed her lips, her eyes, her throat . . .
In every sense of the word she awoke.
With a strangled cry she broke from him, and stood up. He rose with her, facing her, grasping the one essential fact that she had repulsed him, that she shrank from him. He said hoarsely:
“What is it?”
She answered him with the directness that had characterised her father. He had been a “yea”-or-“nay” man.
“I can’t do it, Arthur.”