Her work dropped from her hand to the floor. She stared at him with a face whiter than the linen she had been stitching.
"But you are not going to buy them?" she asked sharply. Something in her tone forced him to meet her eyes.
"Oh, I don't know. Why not? I'm a poor business man, and your husband always seems to come off well in his ventures. Without being in the least a speculator, I should be glad to make a little money." He smiled. "I have another craze on, you see—a gun this time—and it requires capital to complete. So I thought—"
She leaned forward. One small hand lay clenched on the table between them, and there was a force and energy in her attitude which arrested his startled attention.
"I think you are mistaken, Captain Nicholson," she said. "My husband has no shares to sell."
"But yesterday he told me that he had!"
"Yes, yesterday, no doubt. But he heard to-day from the Rajah. I think, if you do not mind waiting, he will tell you himself that what I say is true."
For a second they looked straight at each other without speaking. Neither was conscious of any clear thought, but both knew that in that breathing space they had exchanged a signal from those hidden chambers which men unlock only in brief moments of silent crisis. The crisis had come in spite of a year's defiant struggle. It had broken down the barrier of trivial commonplaces behind which they had always sought shelter; it had rushed over them in a flash, like a sudden tidal wave, scorning their painfully erected defenses, driving them helplessly before it. It had no apparent cause, save that in that moment of alarm she had looked at him with her soul unguarded, and he, overwhelmed by that silent revelation, had allowed his own sternly repressed secret to flash back its breathless message. Nicholson was the first to regain his self-control. He bent down and, picking up her work, restored it gently to her hands.
"You must go on with your sewing," he said. "I like seeing you work.
It completes the picture of a—home—"
"Yes," she interrupted, in a rough, broken voice. "It is a perfect picture, is it not? Just so, as it is—only, of course—" she laughed as he had never heard her laugh before—"of course it's only a tableau—it isn't real."