He bent his ardent eyes upon her with a glow which she had never seen in them even in the earliest days of their love.
“Ah, but it will be only to come back to you,” he said with a leap forward to a joy that made parting dim, and she looked up at him with a soul so steeped in love that for the moment she could only desire what he did.
The evidences of a clinging domesticity were again around them; fierce blasts of heat from the furnace showed that Katy had peacefully forgotten the dampers; the water dripped, dripped into the kitchen sink from the thawing pipes. A hollow clanging cough from the upper regions told that poor little Gwendolen’s post-festive croup had indeed set in, but even this no longer appeared a bitter and blasting ill to Atterbury, but merely a temporary discomfort, to be gone with the morrow.
In the Reign of Quintilia
In the Reign of Quintilia
AS Mr. Nichols sped on his homeward way to the suburbs by boat and train, the abstraction which the clerks had noted grew upon him. At forty-six, his leonine locks streaked with gray, the comfortable, solid, prosperous father of a family, the president of one corporation and member of Heaven only knows how many governing boards, Mr. Nichols was in love—deeply and irremediably in love—with his youngest daughter, an infant of parts.
She was the sixth child, not the seventh, whom tradition surrounds with the mysterious opportunities of good fortune. She was, moreover, the fifth girl in unbroken succession, and her father, like many another man in like case, had not even looked at the baby until she was nearly a week old, only to fall a victim to the charms of the little warm, helpless being after he had once held it in his arms and felt the tiny rose-leaf fingers close over one of his. As he gazed intently at the face with its miniature features, the blue eyes suddenly opened and gazed at him unwinkingly for a space of seconds. Then the lids closed over them peacefully, and a long sigh issued from the parted lips, in its reflex breathing giving the indication of a ridiculous dimple at one corner of the mouth. When Mr. Nichols looked at his wife, who had been observing him, they both smiled, with a tightening of a new bond of affection between them.