She held out her hand, shook his shortly, and went toward the door.
“You needn’t come down,” she said, as he followed her.
“No, but I will.”
“No, you won’t; I don’t want you.”
There was something more imperative in her decree than its tone—a sob; that stopped him at the open door.
The sound of her feet ceased from the stair, the front door slammed, and he walked across to the window, waiting there till the noisy motion of her hansom ebbed into the dull roar of the streets.
He stayed even longer, and the May sky had lost its last memory of the day ere he sat down again before his dying fire.
The girl’s gay audacity seemed to linger like an odor in the room; made pungent, as it were, by that sob. He had not noticed it before. Conscious audacity it was not; for she wore her beauty as a sort of decoration, the star of some regal order, which sanctioned the fine animal magnificence with which she had set the obligations of nobility behind those of good looks, and doubted if the charmed circle of coronets might not prove too dull for her endurance; putting, without a tinge of affectation, nature’s creations before those of dead kings.
But it was not of her vivid exuberance that South was thinking; he had inhaled that before, and the intoxication of it was dissolved. But those sly touches of humility, too faint to be felt through the written record of her words, dropped lids, and looks, and pauses, so unlike her, pressed still as a hand upon his lifted arm. Yet he told himself he had understood them, without the compulsion of her tears.
At least he understood this: that she had thrown the weight of her beauty without avail against the ease and freedom of his unwedded days. Yet it left him with a pricking sense—not of repentance—but that repentance might confront, might even confound, him.