Her question was almost too direct for him. He could not say, to ask her approval of the plan against her husband.
"I had to see you," was all he could reply.
"Why?"
But she knew the real reason. The turning of her eyes away from him confessed it.
It was his chance to say, "Because I love you." An older man might have said it. But the young are timid and conventional--not bold and reckless, as is alleged. He remembered that she was another man's wife and only spoke her name:
"Mollie June!"
Perhaps that did as well. In fact it was, in the reticent dialect of youth, the same thing.
She looked at him a moment, then quickly away again.
"You never called me that but once before--to-night," she said.
At first he found no answer. His mind scarcely sought one. He was absorbed in merely looking at her. She was indeed girlishly perfect as she sat there, almost primly upright, in her white frock, her slender figure framed in the rose-coloured tapestry of the big chair's back and arms, which gave an effect as of a blush to her cheeks and to the white shoulders which he had never seen before except across the spaces of the Peacock Cabaret. To the eyes of middle age she would have been, perhaps, merely "charming." In his she shone with the divine radiance of Aphrodite. And his were right, of course.