X
He had been sitting just so in his library with the lamp behind him and the hollow flare of the coals making an excellent starting place for the House which was now so near him that the mere exhibition in shop windows of the stuffs with which it was being modernly renewed, was enough to set him off for it. It was so near now, that since the announcement of their engagement in September, he had moved through all its obligations benumbed by the white, blinding flash thrown backward from its consummating moment, the moment of her cry to him, of their welding at the core of light and harmony, bounded inevitably by the approaching date of marriage. It had been, he recalled on some one of those occasions of social approval by which it appeared engagements in the Best Society proceeded, that he had sat thus, waiting until the clock ticked on the moment when he might properly join her, sat so full of the sense of her that for the instant he accepted her unannounced appearance at the darkened doorway as the mere extension of his white-heated fancy. The next moment as she charged into the circle of the lamp he saw that the umbra of some strange electrical excitement hung about her. It fairly crackled between them as he rose hurriedly to his feet.
"You have come, Eunice! You have come——"
But he saw well enough what she had come for. She laid the case on the table, but as she tugged impatiently at her glove, the fringe of her wrap caught the clasp of it and scattered the jewels on the cloth. She tried then to put the ring beside them, but her hand shook so that it fell and rolled upon the floor behind them. Peter picked it up quietly, but he did not offer it to her hand again.
"I have come," said Eunice, "to say what in my mother's house I was afraid of being interrupted in saying; what you must see, what my mother won't see."
"I see you are greatly excited about something!"
"I'm not, I'm not.... That is ... I am, but not in the way you think," she was sharp with insistence; "that is what you and mother always say, that I'm nervous or excited, and all the time you don't see."
"What is it I don't see, Eunice?"
"That I can't stand it, that I can't go on with it, that it is dreadful to me,—dreadful!"
"What is dreadful?"