“I thought perhaps you would,” she answered. “You seem to understand most things.”
“You have your own—happiness.”
He hesitated on the word. A quick glance assured her of his ingenuousness. She longed to undeceive him, to shriek out her heartlessness, her contempt for herself and for her life. But pride and loyalty to Morland restrained her within bounds of sanity. She assented to his proposition with a gesture of the shapely hand that lay on the tea-table absently tracing the pattern of the cloth.
“Yes, I have that. But it isn't the fairyland of those two children. You yourself say there is nothing like it in the world. You don't know how I pine for it sometimes—for the things that are sweet and clean and untainted and pure as a mountain spring. They don't come my way. They never will.”
“You are wrong,” said Jimmie. “Love will bring them all to you—that and a perfect wedded life and little children.”
For a flash she raised her eyes and looked full into his, and for the first time the love in the man's heart surged tumultuously. It rose of a sudden, without warning, flooding his being, choking him. What it was of yearning, despair, passion, horror that he saw in her eyes he knew not. He did not read in them the craving of a starved soul for food. To him their burning light was a mystery. All that ever reached his consciousness was that it was a look such as he had never before beheld in a woman's face; and against his will and against his reason it acted like some dark talisman and unlocked floodgates. He clenched the arms of the wickerwork chair, and bit his lip hard, and stared at the ground.
Norma broke into a hard laugh, and lay back in her chair.
“You must be thinking me a great fool,” she said, in her usual mocking tones. “When a woman tries to swim in sentiment, she flounders, and either drowns or has to be lugged ignominiously to shore. She can't swim like a man. Thanks for the rescue, Mr. Padgate.”
He looked at her for a moment.
“What do you mean?” he said curtly.