He stood at the foot, silent, looking up at her, his hair damp and tossed into heavy locks on his forehead, his face ruddy with work and haste—strong, alert, nerved to forgetfulness of everything save one feeling. His eyes, masterful, drew her to him, slowly, steadfastly, step by step; on the last stair she paused, her hand trembling about the carving on the newel post, she could not look in his eyes, she saw instead her rosette in his button-hole.
For him, the cap he held in his hand fluttered to his feet; he held out both hands.
"Frances!" he whispered.
His eyes met hers. Her breast rose in a long breath. The dusky hall, his face shining there, the world empty save for themselves; it was the setting of fate. In one whirling thought the pages of all the old romances she had dreamed over held and impelled her, she was one of them. She was throbbing, sentient with the spirit they rhymed. It was this that beat to suffocation in heart and pulse, and held her helpless. She leaned heavily against the banister. And just below, his face on a level with hers, his eyes, with neither laughter nor triumph, but passionate pleading, searching her face, he stood. He put his arms about her gently, closed them around her passionately, and kissed her,—a joy he had not dreamed he or any man could feel, surging through him; and then she had wrenched herself from him and sped upward.
X
Frances sped upward to her room. Susan had lighted a fire in the grate. She flung herself into the chair before it and covered her face with her hands.
It was unbelievable! Without the excuse of one word of love-making she had allowed what even the Beauty would have fenced gayly against and held off, for a time, at least. All her training, the traditions of her childhood and maidenhood, beat against her fiercely. She slid from the chair to the rug, pressed her face into it, her arms close flung about her head, shutting out the accusations the dusky room was pulsing with; but she shut them the more closely in her heart and they rang there. They were wordless, but she knew them, was conscious of them from head to foot.
All her sweet dignity and gay ease—though she thought not of herself in such manner, only in hot, resentful scorn—were set at naught, and she had played to its full the part she had strenuously held herself from, the love of an hour of a University man.