A tear splashed on to the paper between them. Kent's heart gave one loud throb of comprehension and then yearned over her with the truest emotion that she had wakened in him yet. He caught her close and caressed her, while she clung to him sobbing spasmodically.
"Oh, you do love me? You do love me, don't you?" she gasped. "I'm not a disappointment, am I?"
She slipped on to the hassock at his feet, resting her head on his leg. With the tumbled fairness of her hair across his trouser as she crouched there, she looked more like a child than ever, a penitent child begging forgiveness for some fault. He swore that she had fulfilled and exceeded his most ardent dreams, that she was sweeter in reality than his imagination had promised him; and he pitied her vehemently and remorsefully as he spoke, because in such a moment she was answered by a lie. The lamp, which the servant had neglected, flickered and expired, and on a sudden the room, and the two bent figures before the desk were lit only by the pallor of the moon. Cynthia turned, and looked up in his face deprecatingly:
"Oh, I'm so sorry; I meant to remind her. I'm punished—I'm left in the dark myself!"
He stooped and kissed her. The fondness that he felt for her normally, intensified by compassion, assumed in this ephemeral circumscription of idea the quality of love, and he rejoiced to think that, after all, he was deceived and that their union was indeed, indeed, the mental companionship to which he had looked forward. He did not withdraw his lips; her mouth lay beneath them like a flower; and, his arms enclosing her, she nestled to him voicelessly, pervaded by a deep sense of restfulness and content. In a transient ecstasy of illusive union their spirits met, and life seemed to Kent divine.
[CHAPTER IX]
As, chapter by chapter, the novel grew under his hand, Kent saw, from the little back-window, the snow disappear and the bare trees grow green, until at last a fire was no longer necessary in the room, and the waving fields that he overlooked were yellow with buttercups.
He rose at six now, and did about three hours' work before Cynthia went down. Then they breakfasted, and, with an effort to throw some interest into her voice, she would inquire how he had been getting on. He probably felt that he had not been "getting on" at all, and his response was not encouraging. After breakfast he would make an attempt to read the newspaper, with his thoughts wandering back to his manuscript, and Cynthia would have an interview with Ann. This interview, ostensibly concluded before he went back to his desk, was generally reopened as soon as he took his seat, and for some unexplained reason the sequel usually occurred on the stairs. "Oh, what from the grocer's, ma'am?" "So and so, and so forth."
"Yes, ma'am." "Oh, and—Ann!" "What do you say, ma'am?" More instructions, interrupted by a prolonged banging at the tradesman's door, and the girl's rush to open it. "What is it, Ann?" "The fishmonger, ma'am." "Nothing this morning." "Nothing this morning," echoed by Ann; the boy's departing whistle, "Ann!" "Yes, ma'am?" "Ask him how much a pound the salmon is to-day." "Hi! how much a pound's the salmon?" Meanwhile, Kent beat his fists on the desk, and swore. Once he had pitched his pen at the wall in a frenzy, and dashed on to the landing to remonstrate; but he had felt such a brute when Cynthia cried and declared that he had insulted her before the servant, and it had wasted so much of his morning kissing her into serenity again, that he decided it would hinder him less on the whole to bear the nuisance without complaint.