“Me?” Surprise brought his strategic retreat to a standstill. “I never set up to be a stained-glass saint.”
Again he had blundered. The black eyes flashed fire. “You who move mountains!” she cried angrily.
“Me move mountains?” Bundock was bewildered.
“A little grain of mustard-seed,” he heard her saying more tremulously. “And if a sycamine-tree could move—! Surely you don’t hold with the unbelievers!”
It was precisely whom Bundock did hold with, but the big black eyes seemed suddenly tearful and appealing, her needle seemed entering his breast, and she swam before him as a fine, voluptuous female. Through the passage he saw the apple-trees in bridal bloom and the white feminine washing, and the Master’s remark on the apparent miracle of the extraction of electric flashes from the human body thrilled in his memory.
“Of course not,” he heard himself saying soothingly, while his legs felt going forward, losing all the ground so laboriously won.
“Then you do believe the angel moved?” she asked eagerly.
“Don’t I see her moving?” he replied.
Miss Gentry looked down from her doorstep more in sorrow than in anger. “You’re a married man!” she reminded him again.
“And does marriage pick out a man’s eyes—like a goat-sucker?” He felt too near her now to back out, and he put forth his hand for hers, not without nervousness at the needle. Could his father have seen him now, he might have thought his son not even “moral.” But Miss Gentry dexterously met the amorous palm with a tract. “That’ll open your eyes,” she said.