"Grateful? Yes. You give me gratitude." Maurice was speechless. "I thought, perhaps, you loved me," she said. A minute later he heard her going upstairs to her own room.
He stood staring after her, open-mouthed. Then he said, under his breath, "Good God!" After a while he went over to the fireplace, and, standing with one hand on the mantelpiece, he kicked the charred logs on the hearth together. "This room is cold. I must build the fire up.... Yes, it's true.... The wood is too green to burn. I'll order from another man next time.... I suppose I've been in love with her for a good while. I wonder if it began that night Jacky was sick ... and she kissed me? No; it must have been before that." He stooped and mended the fire, piling the logs together with slow exactness: "What life might have been!" He took up the bellows and urged a little flame to rise and flicker and lap the wood, then burst to crackling blaze. After a while he said, "Poor Nelly!" But he had himself in hand by that time, and, though this terrifying knowledge was surging in him, he knew that his voice would not betray him. He went upstairs to comfort her with kindly assurances that she was wrong. ("More lies," he thought, wearily.)
But apparently she didn't need comforting! She was smoothing her hair before the glass, and seemed perfectly calm. He had expected tears, and violent reproaches, which he was prepared to meet with either good-natured ridicule or quiet falsehood, as the occasion might demand. But nothing was demanded. She continued to brush her hair; so he found it quite easy to come up behind her and lay a hand on her shoulder, and say, "Nelly, dear, that wasn't a nice thing to say!"
She did not meet his eyes in the mirror; she only said (she was trembling), "I suppose it wasn't."
Maurice was puzzled, but he said, casually, that he was sorry to have to rush off that night. "I've got to take the Limited for St. Louis. Mr. Weston wants some papers put through. I hate to leave you."
She made no answer.
"I shall be gone a week, maybe more; because if I don't pull the chestnut out of the fire in St. Louis, I'll have to go to some other places."
She hardly heard him; she was saying to herself: "I oughtn't to have told him she was in love with him; it may make him think so, himself!"
"Guess I'll pack my grip now," he said.
"Maurice," she said, breathlessly, "I didn't mean—" She was so frightened that she couldn't finish her sentence; but he said, with kindly understanding: