“You knew this—the other day—as well as now,” 172 she reminded him, speaking in a stunned voice, yet without anger.
“So help me God, Glory—I had forgotten—everything but—you.”
“And now,” she half whispered in a dulled monotone, “you remember all the rest.”
She sat there with the basket on the puncheon floor at her feet, and her fingers twisted themselves tautly together. Her lips, parted and drooping, gave her delicate face a stamp of dumb suffering, and Spurrier’s arms ached to go comfortingly around her, but he held himself rigid while the silence lengthened. The old clock on the mantel ticked clamorously and outside the calls of the bobwhites seemed to grow louder and nearer until, half-consciously, Spurrier noted their insistence.
Then faintly, Glory said: “You didn’t make me any promise. If you had—I’d give it back to you.”
She rose unsteadily and stood gathering her strength, and Spurrier, struggling against the impulse which assailed him like a madness to throw down the whole structure of his past and designed future and sweep her into his arms, stood with a metal-like rigidity of posture.
Whatever his ultimate decision might be, he kept telling himself, no decision reached by surrender to such tidal emotion at a moment of equinox could be trusted. Glory herself would not trust it long.
So while the room remained voiceless and the minds of the man and the girl were rocking in the swirl of their feelings, the physical senses themselves seemed, instead of inert, preternaturally keen—and something 173 came to Spurrier’s ears which forced its way to his attention through the barrier of his abstraction.
Never had the calls of the quail been so frequent and incessant before, but this sound was different, as though some one in the nearby tangle had stumbled and in the effort to catch himself had caught and shaken the leafage.
So the man went to the door and stood looking out.