"I saw you had an idle moment," he began in a tone of intense amusement.
Frances looked at him uncomprehendingly.
Lawson pointed mischievously to the half drawn curtain. Frances walked swiftly to it and sent the rings clashing along the pole.
"Good!" he cried, "if I may stay."
"Shut out the wind, shut out the weather," his heart was saying to him; he had forgotten the rest of it, but he knew the last word was perilously dear sometimes—"together."
"Together!" It was the first time he had ever really felt the significance of the word with her. Even if there were none others near she had made him feel as if there were a crowd always. Now, the dusky firelit room, the startled look on her face, the half-hesitancy of her speech, he would not miss a tithe of. He stooped and picked up her gloves and hat-pins, and as he handed them to her his hand shook a trifle, awkwardly, and he pricked her.
"Oh dear!" she cried, pathetically as a child, "it's bleeding!"
"Let me see!" There was a round red drop of blood at the finger's tip. "I would not have hurt you for worlds! How stupid! Let me—there!" He was wrapping her hand in his handkerchief and stanching the slight flow at the dainty pink point of her fingers, and blessing the pin, even if it did hurt. How small her hand had seemed, how white, how warm; he unwrapped the swathings and held it palm upwards, looking solicitously and wondering inanely which finger was hurt. The pink palm was unlined as a child's. Lawson eyed it swiftly; he had some idea of palmistry.
"Shall I read your future?" he asked gayly after one quick glance at the marriage cross on the soft flesh under her forefinger.