“Oh, do! You must! It's my very first, you know. I've got an extra ticket.”
And against his will, his judgment—everything, Lennan answered: “Yes.”
She clapped her hands, and the kitten crawled down to her knees.
When he got up to go, she did not move, but just looked up at him; and how he got away he did not know.
Stopping his cab a little short of home, he ran, for he felt cold and stiff, and letting himself in with his latch-key, went straight to the drawing-room. The door was ajar, and Sylvia standing at the window. He heard her sigh; and his heart smote him. Very still, and slender, and lonely she looked out there, with the light shining on her fair hair so that it seemed almost white. Then she turned and saw him. He noticed her throat working with the effort she made not to show him anything, and he said:
“Surely you haven't been anxious! Nell had a bit of a fall—jumping into a sandpit. She's quite mad sometimes. I stayed to tea with her—just to make sure she wasn't really hurt.” But as he spoke he loathed himself; his voice sounded so false.
She only answered: “It's all right, dear,” but he saw that she kept her eyes—those blue, too true eyes—averted, even when she kissed him.
And so began another evening and night and morning of fever, subterfuge, wariness, aching. A round of half-ecstatic torment, out of which he seemed no more able to break than a man can break through the walls of a cell....
Though it live but a day in the sun, though it drown in tenebrous night, the dark flower of passion will have its hour....
XII