“Darley,” repeated the girl; and again that was all.
“‘Darley!’” It was the man’s voice this time, but it sounded as though coming from a distance. “‘Darley!’ At last!—and now!”
“Darley,” yet once again, “as I love you and you love me don’t—desert me now!” 347
On the room fell a silence like death,—to those two actors worse than death; for it held thought infinite and complete realization at last of what might have been and was not; of what as well, unless a miracle intervened, could never be. In it they stood, each where he was, two figures in clay instead of one. Interrupting, awakening, torturing, sounded the thing they had so long expected; the impact of a step upon the floor of the porch without; a moment later another, uncertain, and another; a pause, and then, startlingly loud, the trill of an electric bell.
For an instant neither stirred. It was the expected; and still there is a limit to human endurance. The girl was trembling, in a nervous tension too great to bear longer. An effort indeed she made at control; but it was a pitiful effort and futile. In surrender absolute, abandon absolute, she dropped back into her seat, her arms crossed pathetically on the surface of the library table, her face buried from sight therein.
“Answer it, please,” she pleaded. “I can’t. I’m ashamed, unutterably; but I can’t!”
Again the alarm of the bell sounded; curtly short this time and insistent. 348
Without a word or even a pause Darley Roberts obeyed. As he passed out he closed the door carefully behind him.
Five minutes that seemed to the girl a lifetime dragged by. Listening, she heard the opening of the front door, the murmur of low, speaking voices,—a murmur ceasing as abruptly as it began; then, wonder of wonders, the door closed again with a snap and a retreating step sounded once, twice, as when it had come, on the floor of the porch. Following, she marked the even footfall of Roberts returning. The electric switch that he had turned on snapped back as he had found it, the intervening door opened, and he entered. But, strange to say, he did not pause or say a word. As one awakening from a dream and not yet wholly conscious, he returned silently to his former place. On his face was a look she had never seen before, which she could not fathom.
“Darley.” Unbelieving the girl leaned toward him appealingly. “Tell me. Wasn’t it—he?”