Page:Lady Athlyne (IA ladyathlyne00stok).pdf/182

 and his intentions came into order, he began to understand better the purpose of those two preparations of his which were already complete: the overhauling of his automobile, and the supplying it with female wraps. He intended by some means or other, dependent on developing opportunity, to bring her for a ride in the motor. There, all alone, he would be able to learn, perhaps at first from her bearing and then from her own lips, how she regarded him.

Athlyne was a young man, a very young man in his real knowledge of the sex. There are hundreds, thousands, of half-pulseless boys, flabby of flesh and pallid with enervating dissipation, who would have smiled cynically—they have not left in them grit enough for laughter—at his doubting.

He would not frighten her at first. Here for a time he took himself to task for seeming to plot against the woman he loved. Surely it would be better to treat her with perfect fairness; to lay his heart at her feet; tell her with all the passionate force that swept him how he loved her—tell it with what utterance he had. Then he should wait her decision. No, not decision! That was too cold a word—thought. If indeed there was any answering love to his, little decision would be required. Had he made any decision! From the first moment he had looked in her beautiful grey eyes and lost himself in their depths, his very soul had gone out to her. And it might be that she too had felt something of the same self-abandonment. He could never forget how on that afternoon visit at the Holland she had raised her eyes to his in answer to his passionate appeal: "Joy, Look at me!" Then at that memory, and at the later memory when she had spoken the words herself only the day before—the sweetness of her voice was still tingling in his ears, a sort of tidal wave of lover's rapture swept over him. It overwhelmed him so completely that it left him physically gasping for breath. He was in a tumult; he could not lie in bed. He leaped to his feet and