She looked up and found his eyes waiting to meet hers. They had an undisguised, irrelevant tenderness, and Slaney was surprised into accepting it for one silent moment, while her heart beat and her head swam. She recovered herself, as one might struggle up out of soft ground. The thought of Lady Susan was like setting her feet again on hard rock.
“Mrs. Quin was here to-day,” she said, catching at the first subject that suggested itself. “From what she tells me, I am afraid that Tom Quin must be going out of his mind.”
“I should believe that if I thought he had any mind to go out of,” said Glasgow irritably. Slaney was not playing the part he had cast for her, and the subject of the Quins was not calculated to soothe him. “The whole family have persecuted me about that gravel-pit—Quin, and his mother, and the red-haired sister, and all. I wonder if they really think I am going to give up working the place to please them!”
“Yes, I think they do,” replied Slaney, staring before her into the blue and pink and yellow flames of the wood fire. Then, after a pause, “I am not quite sure that I don’t sympathize with them.”
“Sympathize with what?” asked Glasgow impatiently. “With their distress, or with their superstition?”
At his tone her fastidious upper lip had set itself again into an unsympathetic line; her forehead seemed as white and quiet as the moonlight behind her.
“Very well,” said Glasgow, provoked and scornful, yet beyond all things attracted, “I take all consequences. I appropriate all the ill-luck. Now will you sympathize with me?”
“Oh, don’t!” she exclaimed, putting out her hand with a horrified gesture, as if what he had said would be instantly overheard.
“Will you?” he repeated, deliciously perceptive of her fear, and before he realized what he was doing he had kissed the fastidious, spiritual mouth, and found it a trembling and human one.