He shook his head, but said no more. She murmured good-night, and he went. She heard the motor drive away, and remained standing where he had left her, the hand he had kissed hanging at her side. She still felt the touch of his lips upon it, and as the blood rushed into her cheeks, her heart was conscious of new and strange emotions. She longed to go to him as a sister or a daughter might, and say—"Forgive me—understand me—don't despair of me!"
The trance of feeling broke, and passed away. She caught up a cloak and went to the hall door to listen for Gertrude Marvell.
"What I shall have to say to him before long, is—'I have tricked you this quarter out of £500—and I mean to do it again next quarter—if I can!' He won't want to kiss my hand again!"
Chapter X
Two men sat smoking and talking with Paul Lathrop in the hook-littered sitting-room of his cottage. One was a young journalist, Roger Blaydes, whose thin, close-shaven face wore the knowing fool's look of one to whom the world's his oyster, and all the bricks for opening it familiar. The other was a god-like creature, a poet by profession, with long lantern-jaws, grey eyes deeply set, and a mass of curly black hair, from which the face with its pallor and its distinction, shone dimly out like the portrait of a Cinquecento. Lathrop, in a kind of dressing-gown, as clumsily cut as the form it wrapped, his reddish hair and large head catching the firelight, had the look of one lazily at bay, as wrapped in a cloud of smoke, he twined from one speaker to the other.
"So you were at another of these meetings last night?" said Blaydes, with a mouth half smiling, half contemptuous.
"Yes. A disgusting failure! They didn't even take the trouble to pelt us." The poet—Merian by name—moved angrily on his chair. Blaydes threw a sly look at him, as he knocked the ash from his cigarette.
"And what the deuce do you expect to get by it all?"
Paul Lathrop paused a moment—and at last said with a lift of the eyebrows:—
"Well!—I have no illusions!"