Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/134

 After he had gone, she remained seated there, her hands clasped between her knees, in a girlish attitude of puzzled meditation. When she smiled doubtfully, it was because she recalled his thin fingers on the piano keys and his bony wrists exposed below his coat sleeves by the outstretching of his arms. When she frowned, it was at the recurring thought of his strangeness, his moodiness, his failure to rise to her innocent coquetry and good spirits. When she blushed, blinking uncertainly, it was at the memory of that sudden fluttering of his eyelids and the approach of a caress which she had suspected but which she could not be sure, now, that he had attempted. At last, rising quickly, she took up her photographs, as if to put away from her the thought of this evening that had been such a perplexing failure; and she stood smiling down, with a pleased appreciation, on the camera's reflection of her pretty face.

  began the struggle between his romantic ideals and his natural instincts; and it began a week of constraint and strangeness in his manner toward her; and it ended by making her fear that he was bored by her, that he was no longer interested in her small talk, walking with her through the melting snows or freezing rains of March in a depressing silence that was either absent-minded or worse. She 