For the first time the smile faded from his face, and something in his altered features arrested her glass at her very lips.
"How suddenly serious you seem," she said. "Have I said anything?"
He drained his glass; after a second she tasted hers, looked at him, finished it, still watching him.
"Really," she said; "you made me feel for a moment as though you and I were performing a solemn rite. That was a new phase of you to me—that exceedingly sudden and youthful gravity."
He remained silent. Into his mind, just for a second, and while in the act of setting the glass to his lips, there had flashed a flicker of pale clairvoyance. It seemed to illumine something within him which he had never believed in—another self.
For that single instant he caught a glimpse of it, then it faded like a spark in a confused dream.
He raised his head and looked gravely across at Strelsa Leeds; and level-eyed, smiling, inquisitive, she returned his gaze.
Could this brief contact with her have evoked in him a far-buried something which had never before given sign of existence? And could it have been anything resembling aspiration that had glimmered so palely out of an ordered and sordid commonplace personality which, with all its talent for frivolity, he had accepted as his own?
Without reason a slight flush came into his cheeks.
"Why do you regard me so owlishly?" she asked, amused. "I repeat that you made me feel as though we were performing a sort of solemn rite when we drank our toast."