Page:MacGrath--The drums of jeopardy.djvu/265

255 took her by the shoulders, bringing her round so that the light was full in her face. Slate-blue eyes.

"Kitty, what would you say if I kissed you?" Inwardly he asked: "Now, what the devil made me say that?"

The sinister and cynical idea leaped from its ambush. "Why, Cutty, I—I don't believe I should mind. It's—it's you!" Vile wretch that she was!

Cutty, noting the lily succeeding the rose, did not kiss her. Fate has a way of reversing the illogical and giving it logical semblance. It was perfectly logical that he should not kiss her; and yet that was exactly what he should have done. The fatherliness of the salute—and he couldn't have made it anything else—would have shamed Kitty's peculiar state of mind out of existence and probably sent back to its eternal sleep that which was strangely reawaking in his lonely heart.

"Forgive me, Kitty. That wasn't exactly nice of me, even if I was trying to be funny."

She tore away from him, flung herself upon the divan, her face in the pillows, and let down the dam.

This wild sobbing—apparently without any reason—terrified Cutty. He put both hands into his hair, but he drew them out immediately without retaining any of the thinning gray locks. Done up, both of them; that was the matter. He longed to console her, but knew not what to say or how to act. He had