Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/75

Rh To no one who remembers Celia Cibber in "By Hook or Crook" will any description of her smile seem adequate. It was one of those elusive smiles that do not wrinkle, that do not so much as pucker, the face—that do not even draw a line from the nostril to the mouth, but turn aside, under the rounding cheeks, and twinkle in two dimples there. It opened her eyes gaily. It showed the white of parted teeth that were waiting for the low laugh and darling chuckle that were to follow.

When the chuckle came he dropped her hand. But in that brief interval he had seen and decided that she was as handsome as ever, as inscrutable as ever, and more at her ease with him than ever. The friendliness of her smile was only the sparkle of sunlight on very deep water; he knew it; he knew that no amount of peering would give him a sight of what lay below that dazzle; and it was with the intention of clouding it over, that he repeated, with his persistent frown: "What are you doing here?

"Living," she said. "Don't you like it?"

It was a blue-and-white kitchen, with blue-and-white curtains on the windows, blue-and white china on the shelves, blue-and-white linoleum on the floor.

"Stagy," he said. He repeated "Stagy" at her blue-and-white checked apron.

"Sniff now," she said, and I 'll think I 'm at a rehearsal again."

He preserved his expression of Dantesque severity and disgust. It was an expression which she had once thought awfully like Sir Henry Irving's at his most