Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/301

 He held her delicate chin between his thumb and forefinger and tipped it back so he could gaze into the inscrutable black lacquer of her eyes. Before he stopped to ponder the expression of her face, he fell to kissing it, and when he looked at her again was only conscious of the love and tenderness that suffused it.

The March wind staggered about the Concord house, striking at doors, shaking shutters. By its sound you knew that it smelt of melting earth and sticky buds. Inside was a dingy, not unpleasant taint of coke burning in the Franklin grate, and a lingering fragrance of dinner. Bending near the stove for warmth, the gas-lamp at her elbow, sat Mrs. Sears Ripley, crocheting just such baby socks she once had recommended for infants in the pages of 'Hearth and Home.'

Ticking clocks, reptilian hiss of fire, and without, the scampering wind.

She abandoned herself in a yawn, flinging out her long arms, shutting her eyes. Her wool work slipped to the carpet. The clocks ticked. The fire hissed. She leaned forward to pick up the sock, but instead huddled up over the fire, her elbows on her knees, her forehead in her hands.

'I am tired,' she said, 'or sleepy,' and thought of the horsehair sofa out of sight at the back of the room beyond the radiance of the gas-lamp. Sears was above in his study working on Dante. He would finish canto twelve to-night, and she would finish the sock.