“I don’t know, Milly. Oh, God, I’m tired—tired!”
Milly found the strength to rise. She had seen Nat enter the office and followed to tell him there had been a mistake of ten cents in her weekly envelope. But it was plain she had come instead to encounter, all unwittingly, her Amethyst Moment.
She made an appealing picture, standing before the lad with wistful solicitation on her face,—half-frightened, not knowing whether to stay or to flee, held half by morbid curiosity, half by the titanic possibilities of the drama. Everything about her was cheap, but was that not because she had been denied something better—like the boy himself?
Hardly knowing that he did so, groping, the scion of the House of Forge raised his left hand. His fingers touched the fabric of her cloak sleeve.
He did not especially want Milly. He wanted Woman—the solacing, maternal spirit—wanted it horribly in one of life’s great disappointments. Milly at the moment only stood for Woman.
The girl did not shrink from his touch. She stood motionless, waiting, with the blood dying out of her face.
The boy’s other hand found the girl’s other arm. Both his hands crept up toward her ample shoulders.
Nathan took old Jake Richards’ daughter to his heart. And old Jake Richards’ daughter responded somehow, frightened out of her wits.
It was twenty-one minutes past eight. The town clerk’s office would be open until nine o’clock. The day was Saturday and taxpayers came in to settle their assessments and water rents. There was time, then, that night, to get a marriage license.
Nathan had no heart to take his hideous disappointment back to a home where father and mother were still “at it.” Forever “at it.”