“Love her? Heaven knows I love her. My soul is a footstool for her to rest her feet upon.”
Connie Deering laid her hand on his.
“I'm sorry. Oh, I'm sorry, Jimmie. God bless you, dear.”
He raised the hand to his lips. Neither spoke. He plucked at the grass by his side; at length he looked up.
“You won't give me away, will you?” he said with a smile, using her dialect.
She went on her knees and clasped both his wrists. She said the first thing that came, as something sacred, into her head.
“I could no more speak of this to any one than of some of my dead husband's kisses.”
“I know you are a good true woman, Connie,” he said.
In the silence that followed, Norma, who had come to summon Connie to tea (the Spencer-Temples having called on their drive past the gates merely to deliver a message), and hearing the voice behind the hedge had been compelled against her will to listen—Norma, deadly white, shaken to the roots of her being, crept across the tennis lawn and fled in swaying darkness to her room.