Oh, it was foolish! she told herself angrily. And she didn’t want it to happen! She hoped it wouldn’t! Resolutely she began her work again, but the noise of the approaching machine seemed to fill the world with a tumult of sound. Then, close at hand, the measured chugs suddenly became hurried and incoherent, as though the intruding monster was violently incensed at being stopped. Then—silence, appalling, portentous! With white face the girl bent closer to her desk, her pen tracing quivering figures and letters. The outer door opened and closed again with a muffled jar. She heard the swish ... swish of the inner doors as they swung inward and back. Firm footfalls sounded on the oaken floor. Very different they were from the soft tread of the library habitué, and there was a determined, resolute character to them that put the brown-haired librarian in a panic. Oh, how she wished that she had fled while there had been time! She no longer doubted; the unexpected, which all along had been the expected, had happened; the thing which she had feared, and always hoped for, had come to pass. The steps came nearer, straight from the doorway, scorning the longer and quieter paths provided by the cocoa-fibre matting. The brown head still bent over the desk. Then the footsteps stopped. A terrible silence fell over the room. There was no help for it.
Slowly, reluctantly the girl raised her head.
[XIV.]
Had they lived in the Age of Stone that meeting might have proved far more interesting for purposes of description. As it was, both being fairly conventional characters of the Twentieth Century, the affair was disappointingly commonplace.
“How do you do, Miss Hoyt?” he asked, smiling calmly and reaching a hand across the counter. And,——
“Why, Mr. Parmley!” she replied, laying her own hand for an instant in his.
A close observer, and both you and I, patient reader, pride ourselves upon being such, would have noticed, perhaps, that in spite of the commonplace words and the unembarrassed manners, the man’s cheeks held an unaccustomed tinge of color and the girl’s face was more than ordinarily pale. And could we have enjoyed a physician’s privilege of examining the heart-action at that moment we would have straightened ourselves up with very knowing smiles.