“The hand?” she asked provokingly.
“No; what I’ve just put into it!”
“Oh, I don’t need to keep that, do I? Won’t there be some more?”
“Millions!” he replied and clasped her tight.
“Your hands are finely shaped and interesting, Ward. Oh, you have a double life line! You’ll never die! The Mount of Apollo is wonderfully developed—don’t you see it, right there? Of course that’s what that is. It’s plain enough why music affects you so. You really might have been an artist of some kind yourself.”
This called for an argument in the course of which she got illuminative glimpses of him as a boy who was always interested in machinery. He had been predestined to the calling he had chosen but confessed that sometimes he wished that he had tried his hand at executive work.
“I may do it yet,” he said. “I have opportunities occasionally, which I’m probably foolish to let pass, to take hold of big concerns. But I’ve liked my freedom to roam. It’s helped solve my problem to be able to wander.”
“Yes, I understand, dear,” she said softly, stroking his hair. She knew that by his problem he meant his wife. Though she had accepted as sincere his explanation of his relations with Mrs. Trenton, she resented in spite of herself even this remote reference to the woman whom she had never seen but had constantly tried to visualize.
“I might even move to Indianapolis one of these days,” he was saying. “I have a standing offer from Tommy to come and help him run his plant. I tell him it’s his game to wish his job on me so he can have more time to play. And Tommy doesn’t need that!”
She drew from his waistcoat pocket the locket that had so aroused her curiosity at their first meeting.