The girl leans down and stirs the fire into a leaping, yellow blaze. It fills the room with light, and reveals them fully now to each other.
She makes no effort to detain him, and they look at each other, about to part.
The self-control of each is marvellous, and admirable for its mere thoroughness and completeness.
He has large eyes, and they stare down at her haggardly, as he stands facing her in the light. The hungry, hopeless look in those eyes and the drawn lines in his face go to the girl's heart, and to herself it seems literally melting into one warm flood of sympathy.
Ill! he looks ill and wretched, and she longs with a longing that presses upon her, till it is like a physical agony, to give some way to her feelings.
"Dearest, my dearest!" she is thinking, "if I might only tell you—even a little—"
And Stephen stares at the soft face and warm lips, half-paralyzed with desire to bend down and kiss them. How would a kiss be? how would they—And so there is a momentary, barely perceptible pause, filled with a painful intensity of feeling, to which neither gives way one hair's breadth. Then he gives a curt laugh.
"We have discussed rather a difficult problem and not settled it," he says in a conventional tone.
"It seems to me quite simple," murmurs the girl, with a throat so dry that the words are hardly audible.
He hears, but makes no reply beyond another slight laugh, as he holds out his hand. The girl puts hers into it. There is a moderate pressure only on either side, and then he goes out and shuts the door, leaving the girl standing motionless—all the warm springs in her heart frozen by his last cynical laugh.