“Don’t—please.”
A mounting exasperation seized him at the secrecy that veiled her, hid her from him, and he answered stiffly: “I am merely intrusive.”
King Vidor’s “Wild Oranges.” A Goldwyn Picture.
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.
She was seated above him, and she leaned forward and swiftly pressed his fingers, loosely clasped about a knee. Her hand was as cold as salt. His irritation vanished before a welling pity. He got now a sharp, recognized happiness from her nearness; his feeling for her increased with the accumulating seconds. After the surrender, the admission, of his return he had grown elemental, sensitized to emotions rather than to processes of intellect. His ardor had the poignancy of the period beyond youth. It had a trace of the consciousness of the fatal waning of life which gave it a depth denied to younger passions. He wished to take Millie Stope at once from all memory of the troublous past, to have her alone in a totally different and thrilling existence.
It was a personal and blind desire, born in the unaccustomed tumult of his newly released feelings.
They sat for a long while, silent or speaking in trivialities, when he proposed a walk to the sea; but she declined in that curiously loud and false tone. It seemed to Woolfolk that, for the moment, she had addressed someone not immediately present; and involuntarily he looked around. The light of the hidden lamp in the hall fell in a pale, unbroken rectangle on the irregular porch. There was not the shifting of a pound’s weight audible in the stillness.
Millie breathed unevenly; at times he saw she shivered uncontrollably. At this his feeling mounted beyond all restraint. He said, taking her cold hand: “I didn’t tell you why I went last night—it was because I was afraid to stay where you were; I was afraid of the change you were bringing about in my life. That’s all over now, I—”
“Isn’t it quite late?” she interrupted him uncomfortably. She rose and her agitation visibly increased.