The widow’s eyes looked red and her voice quavered as she said, “I am so lonely, Samson, och, so lonely!”
“Aye,” said Samson, trying to shift his glance from her appealing face.
Dolly dropped into a chair and slipped back her scarf. Her chin trembled pitifully. “I am so lonely, Samson; I thought perhaps you had forgotten me?”
“No, I’ve not indeed.”
“Well, and don’t you love me any more? I thought you’d never forget.”
“Aye, I love you but—but——”
At this Dolly rushed upon him like an impulsive, gladdened child. “Och, then, nothing else matters, nothing at all whatever!” She clung to him eagerly, and with her arms about him the last vestige of Samson Jones’s resolution was quenched.
After that, through the blissful evening he knew nothing but blind snatching at ecstasy. He tried to forget everything. That night, when he saw Dolly home, she was an appeased, contented child whose only thought of the morrow is the untroubled one that it will come again and again with the same delicious happiness.
But never had Samson Jones known anything like the week that followed, with its dissimulations petty and large, its pained irresolution, its alternations between ecstasy and despair. The surface of his mild zealous eyes had come to have the feverish look of a man living in a delirium. With Jane Elin he was gallant, attentive, punctilious, a finished lover. With Dolly he gave himself up so to the luxury of their love, that the widow Morgan wondered why she had not seen before the extravagant passionateness of his nature.