“Afraid to?”
“Let’s drop this!” came swift and sharp from Brooks.
“I can’t—I’ve got to know,” Cleeburg broke in pitifully. Then to Gloria like a man pleading for life: [213] ]“You didn’t want me to book you and John for London. You preferred not to go. That’s a fact, ain’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Was it—was it because you didn’t want to be over there with him—alone?”
She stared as he put the question—stared into the eyes that were like a bleeding animal’s.
“I didn’t want to go without you. You know that.”
He saw her mouth quiver at the corners and her teeth hold the lower lip. And all her nervousness that night of the dress rehearsal swept before him in torturing detail. He shook his head helplessly. He grasped the arm of a chair as he had once before and steadied himself. Haltingly the words he had known he must speak came at last.
“Why wouldn’t you go without me? Was that—was it because you knew what I know now—that he loves you?”
She gave a start. He saw her eyes fly to the other man’s. There was nothing of indignation in that look, nothing of anger. Terror—yes—and question! But back of both a glow—the instinctive look of the one woman to the one man that will live as long as the world. Because unconscious, it was all the revelation the man who watched her needed. A sort of groping wonder at his blindness seized him. Then little ’Dolph sank into the chair and, like a candle snuffed, hope went out of his eyes.