She responded to his wistful smile with another, as chill and pale as moonlight.
"Thank you; and, Captain Clendenon, you may tell your correspondent that I shall avail myself of his gracious permission to visit another city—not Memphis. I have no desire to visit there at present."
He looked down at the sweet, flushed, mutinous face with a yearning pity in his eyes, and a great throb of pain at his heart—the anguish of a man who sees a woman that is dear to him bowed beneath sufferings that he cannot alleviate.
All he could do was to clasp the small hand in sympathetic farewell, and beg her earnestly to call on him if ever she needed a friend's services.
"Since you will not go to Memphis," he said, relinquishing the small hand.
"No, I will not go—at least, not now," she answered, supplementing the harsh reply by a very gentle good-by.
When she did go, Paul Winans would have given all he possessed on earth to have recalled that freely accorded consent.
"I like Captain Clendenon so much," she wrote, in daintiest of Italian text, that night, within the sacred pages of her journal. "There is something so supremely noble about him, and to-day he looked at me so sorrowfully, so kindly, as I have fancied a dear brother or sister might do, had I ever been blessed with one. I used to shrink at seeing him; he brought back the first great shock of my life so vividly, and does still, though not so painfully as of old. It is only like touching the spot where a pain has been now—'what deep wound ever healed without a scar?' And I do not mind it now, though the unspoken sympathy in his great gray eyes used to wound my proud spirit deeply. I don't think he ever dreamed of it, though. Mrs. Conway used to think that he liked me excessively. I don't know—I think she was mistaken. I cannot fancy Willard Clendenon loving any woman except with the calm, superior love of a noble brother for a dear little sister. And he has a sister, though I have never seen her—charmingly pretty, Norah says she is. I believe I should like to know her, if she is at all like her brother. But all women, as a rule, are so frivolous—or, at least, all those whom fate has thrown in my way. At least, I should like to have a brother like this quiet, unselfish captain—this sterling, irreproachable character with the ring of the true metal about it—and a sister like what I fancy his pretty sister must be. Oh, Paul, were you not so cruel my poor heart would not be throwing out its bruised tendrils so wildly, seeking for some sure support on which to lean its fainting strength. It is so hard to stand alone——"
She closed the book abruptly at a sound of baby laughter from the nursery, and gliding into the room stood looking at Norah's busy movements. She was giving Master Paul his nightly bath on the rug in front of the fire. Up to his white and dimpled shoulders, in the marble bath of perfumed water, the little fellow was laughing and enjoying the fun to his heart's content. It won the child-like young mother to laughter too. She seated herself on a low ottoman near him, and watched the dear little baby, with its graceful, exquisite limbs flashing through the water, a rosy, perfect little Cupid, and something like content warmed her chilled and perturbed spirit.
"I can never be utterly desolate while I have him," she murmured, running her taper, jeweled fingers through the clustering rings of his dark hair.