Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/260

248 “I want you to kiss me.”

“Yes,” he said awkwardly, glancing over his shoulder, acutely aware of the promenaders passing close to them.

“It’s a promise?”

“Yes.”

Very timidly and guiltily his hand sought hers beside it and gripped it and pressed it. “My dear!” he whispered, tritest and most unavoidable of expressions. It was not very like Man and Woman loving upon their Planet; it was much more like the shy endearments of the shop boys and work girls who made the darkling populous about them with their silent interchanges.

“There are a thousand things I want to talk about to you,” she said. “After we have parted to-morrow I shall begin to think of them. But now—every rational thing seems dissolved in this moonlight.”...

Presently she made an effort to restore the intellectual dignity of their relationship.

“I suppose I ought to be more concerned to-night about the work I have to do in the world and anxious for you to tell me this and that, but indeed I am not concerned at all about it. I seem to have it in outline all perfectly clear. I mean to play a man’s part in the world just as my father wants me to do. I mean to win his confidence and work with him—like a partner. Then some day I shall be a power in the world of fuel. And at