"Perhaps for that very reason."
He leaned over and drew the robe farther about my exposed shoulder. I felt the strength of his arm as he pulled at the heavy pelt, the gentleness of his touch as he tucked it behind my back. So little of this thoughtfulness and care had been mine! Almost nothing of it in my life! No wonder that other women who are cared for, carried on loving hands, protected by the bulwark of a man's love, cannot understand what the simple adjustment of that robe around a chilled shoulder meant to me, Marcia Farrell!
He was always doing something in general for my comfort and pleasure, but never anything special. Even this drive I owed to Jamie's physical inability to accept his friend's invitation. But this fact did not quench my joy.
"Are you comfortable—feet warm?" he asked for the second time.
"As warm as toast."
What was it that I felt as I continued to sit silent by this man's side?—an alien, I had called him to the Doctor; fool that I was! I felt a peculiar sense of perfect physical rest I had never before experienced, a consciousness of happy companionship that needed no word to make itself understood. This sense of companionship, this rest of soul and body during the two hours I passed at this man's side—I enjoyed them to the full. The feelings and emotions of the woman who, only a few evenings before, had thrown off the yoke of burdening circumstance, who had broken, to her own physical benefit, with past associations and memories, found scope, in the protecting night and the silence, for perilous nights of imagination. Thoughts undreamed of hitherto, desires I had never supposed permissible in my narrow walk of life, proved their power over me at this hour. Hopes unbounded, if wholly unfounded,—for what had this man ever said to me since his home-coming that he had not said a dozen times to every member of his household?—imagined joys of another, a dual life—
"Yes," I said to myself, giving rein to pleasing fantasy, "a dual life in one—our lives, his and mine, one and inseparable; why not, Marcia Farrell? Why should n't I grasp with both hands outstretched at all life may have to give me? Why not hold it fast even if it have thorns?"
Imagination was carrying me out of myself. I called a halt to all this frenzy, as it at once appeared to me by the cold light of the moon, and brought myself down to earth and common sense with a jolt. I moved uneasily.
"Are you cold?" Mr. Ewart asked, evidently noticing the movement.
"No; but too much aurora, I 'm afraid."