“How do you know that?”
“Your smile is not for any common man, and I’ll wager your heart is as whole as your beauty.”
She looked at him for a moment of silence, then:
“I cannot imagine why you say all this,” quoth she, in real puzzlement.
“’Tis an easing to the tortured heart to reveal itself,” he answered, “as one would fain uncover an inner wound, though there be no hope of cure. I can go the calmer to my doom for having at least given outlet in words to the flame kindled in a moment within me. My doom! Yes, and none so unwelcome, either, if by it I escape a lifetime of vain longing!”
“Your talk is incomprehensible, sir. If you are serious, it must be that your head is turned.”
“My head is turned, doubtless, but by you!”
He was now assuming the low, quick, nervous utterance that is often associated with intense repressed feeling; and his words were accompanied by his best possible counterfeit of the burning, piercing, distraught gaze of passion. Though he acted a part, it was not with the cold-blooded art of a mimic who simulates by rule; it was with the animation due to imagining himself actually swayed by the feeling he 147 would feign. While he knew his emotion to be fictitious, he felt it as if it were real, and his consequent actions were the same as if real it were.
“I’m sure the act was not intentional with me,” said Elizabeth. “I’d best leave you, lest you grow worse.” And she moved towards the door.
Peyton had rapid work of it, pushing the chair before him and hopping after it, so as to intercept her. In the excitement of the moment, he lost his mastery of himself.