Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/220

 emotions of a screen star with the chest heaves. It seemed to me that life had become amazingly melodramatic.

He began to pace up and down the room under the sloping ceiling, talking in low, eager, distracted tones, throwing out abrupt and meaningless gestures at me. He was vitalized with emotion to a degree that made him feverishly demonstrative, but inexpressive. He bewildered me. He filled the little dormer-windowed room with a noiseless clamor of incoherent whispers and incommunicable dumb show and jumpy shadows. I sat down on the side of the bed and felt dizzy.

Suddenly he stopped. He stood waiting in a breathy silence. The chintz curtains parted before her, over an open door. And with her entrance our movie melodrama became, at once, the tragedy of beauty and dignity and poignant repression. She was draped in some sort of flowing dressing-gown that made her appear matronly and classical. Her hair had been hastily gathered up in a coiled disorder high on her head. She came in from the darkness to our light noiselessly, and found him with a slow, set look that pitied him and suffered for him and stood firm. It was a look of irrevocable judgment and unmerciful compassion; and it made her most movingly beautiful to see.

Con cried out at once and rushed to her and took her in his arms. I went to blink out a window.

I began to realize the seriousness of the situation