Then out of the face the passion faded and the deep eyes widened to a suffering like that of despair. The sweetly curved lips drooped in an ineffable wistfulness and the smooth throat worked spasmodically, while the hands went up and covered the face.
Spurrier drew back into the room into which Glory could not see, and then in warning of his coming spoke aloud in a matter-of-fact voice. “I’ve found it,” he declared. “It was hiding out from me—that watch.”
When, after that preface, he came back, Glory was standing again in the doorway and as she turned, she 170 presented a face from which had been banished the storm of her recent agitation.
He handed her the watch which she took with a steady hand, and a brief but cheery, “Farewell.”
As she started away Spurrier braced himself with a strong effort and inquired: “Glory, didn’t you have any question to ask me—about the girl—in the frame?”
She halted in the path and stood looking down. Her lowered lids hid her eyes, but he thought her cheeks paled a shade. Then she shook her head.
“Not unless it’s something—you want to tell—without my asking,” she announced steadfastly.
For over a week he had struggled to bring himself to his confession and had failed. Now a sudden impulse assured him that it would never be easier; that every delay would make it harder and blacken him with a heavier seeming of treason. Vivien’s portrait served as a fortuitous cue, and he must avail himself of it.
This was the logical time and place, when silence would be only an unuttered lie and when procrastination would strip him of even his residue of self-respect. To wait for an easy occasion was to hope for the impossible and to act with as craven a spirit as to falter when the bugle sounded a charge.
Yet he remained so long silent that Glory, looking up and reading the hard-wrung misery on his face and the stiff movement of the lips that made nothing of their efforts, knew, in advance, the tenor of the unspoken message.