II
The breath of that November night was soft and warm, its dim sky distilled a pensive rain with frequent lulls. Burnished by the daily traffic of eighty thousand tires the wet pave of the Avenue resembled a broad channel of black marble veined with pulsing gold. Over churning tides of after-theatre travel the police towers watched like great gaunt goblins, stabbing the misty mirk with angry eyes, ruby, emerald, and amber.
The brougham drifted sedately with the northbound press; its pace all too swift notwithstanding, its journey too quickly accomplished. Yet neither of the lovers had spoken since leaving the Ritz. Only when the grey palisades of the Hotel Walpole loomed ahead, spangled with the gilt of a thousand windows, the woman stirred in her corner and sat forward, peering with fond concern into the face of the man, giving him her hands.
"Be patient with me, Michael," she said. "It isn't that I can't read your heart—I know, my dear, I know! . . . All you said just now was true enough; but all the truth has not yet been said. Neither are my wits as ready as yours. You must give me time to think. You will, I know."
"I am altogether yours," he answered. "Your happiness is all that matters."
"Not all, not my happiness alone, but yours as well—ours!"
She swayed into his arms; for the first time Lanyard knew her lips . . .
He came to himself, after a fashion, standing bare of head beneath a lamp-fringed canopy of bronze and glass, formally touching her fingers and mouthing polite phrases as to a woman he barely knew . . . Absurd!
And on her part only enriched colour and a heightened radiance in her eyes betrayed the revolutionary work of those too few moments.