Sylvia drew away from Runyon, not spasmodically, but as if she were moving in her sleep. She left one hand on Runyon’s sleeve. She was regarding Harboro with an expression of hopeless bewilderment. She seemed incapable of speaking. You would not have said she was frightened. You would have thought: “She has been slain.”
Harboro’s lips were moving, but he seemed unable to speak immediately.
It was Sylvia who broke the silence.
“You shouldn’t have tricked me, Harboro!” she said. Her voice had the mournful quality of a dove’s.
He seemed bewildered anew by that. The monstrous inadequacy of it was too much for him. He had tricked her, certainly, and that wasn’t a manly thing to do. He seemed to be trying to get his faculties adjusted. Yet the words he uttered finally were pathetically irrelevant, it would have seemed. He addressed Runyon.
“Are you the sort of man who would talk about—about this sort of thing?” he asked.
Runyon had not ceased to regard him alertly with an expression which can be described only as one of infinite distaste—with the acute discomfort of an irrepressible creature who shrinks from serious things.
“I am not,” he said, as if his integrity were being unwarrantably questioned.
Harboro’s voice had been strained like that of a man who is dying of thirst. He went on with a disconcerting change of tone. He was trying to speak more vigorously, more firmly; but the result was like some talking mechanism uttering words without shading them properly. “I suppose you are willing to marry her?” he asked.
It was Sylvia who answered this. “He does not wish to marry me,” she said.