Page:Glimpses of the Moon (Wharton 1922).djvu/342

332 the dried grasses her face looked long pale inanimate. Ah, if he should find her too changed—! If there were but time to dash upstairs and put on a touch of red.

The door opened; it shut on him; he was there.

He said: "You wanted to see me?"

She answered: "Yes." And her heart seemed to stop beating.

At first she could not make out what mysterious change had come over him, and why it was that in looking at him she seemed to be looking at a stranger; then she perceived that his voice sounded as it used to sound when he was talking to other people; and she said to herself, with a sick shiver of understanding, that she had become an "other person" to him.

There was a deathly pause; then she faltered out, not knowing what she said: "Nick—you'll sit down?"

He said: "Thanks," but did not seem to have heard her, for he continued to stand motionless, half the room between them. And slowly the uselessness, the hopelessness of his being there overcame her. A wall of granite seemed to have built itself up between them. She felt as if it hid her from him, as if with those remote new eyes of his he were staring into the wall and not at her. Suddenly she said to herself: "He's suffering more than I am, because he pities me, and is afraid to tell me that he is going to be married."