I shook my head again.
She came up on her elbow—all weak and shaking. She had on that gray silk kimono that I love—the one with the wistaria blossoms embroidered on it. I felt her eyes searching my thoughts, and I could only look at the soft gray blossoms on her sleeve and study out the pattern.
“Anthony,” she was saying, with something of that musical “edge” in her voice—“Anthony, what have you done?”
I told her. I even moved my chair aside and let her gaze past me and through the open doorway into my room, where she could see bits of the broken cylinders scattered about the floor.
Was I pleading the cause of my love for her, of my—yes—of my desire for her, in thus giving way to the unexpected impulse to have her see those broken cylinders with her own eyes? God pity me, I do not know! All I am sure of is that I suddenly wanted her to know all about those miserable, weak hours of mine. And a strange, tremulous hope was fluttering to life in my heart. It was possible that we should again work together, she and I!
This hope fluttered and grew. I felt my heart beat more quickly, and a touch of that odd dryness in the throat that comes to me when Heloise and I are close, when I touch her hand or her sleeve and know at the same moment that she is thinking of me and that her feelings are in some mysterious way interwoven with mine.
I recall that I moved forward on my chair I moved still farther, and sat on the edge of the bed. I slipped my arm behind her head. I drew her lovely, dark head against my breast. I bent over and kissed her fragrant hair and rubbed my cheek against it.
I was stroking her hair and her soft cheek. I bent lower and kissed her forehead. Then I kissed her cheek.
I could not help it. I did not know I was going to do it. I know now that she had stopped resisting before this. She let me kiss her.
Slowly this fact made itself felt in my mind and in my heart. She had let me kiss her, but she had been unable to respond. And I remembered what she had said, hours or years ago, and the poignant sadness of it—