Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/157

Rh down as audacity. It was innocent, he reminded himself, because it was unstudied. But he remained resolutely turned away from the soft confusion of sounds behind him.

"Will you marry me?" he repeated.

His ear caught the sigh that escaped her: it was almost one of forbearance.

"Wait until I crawl into my downy, Honey. I'm so dog-tired!"

He waited. He waited until he heard her fatigued little coo of subsidence, listening to the complaint of the burdened coil-springs with a sense of history repeating itself.

"Owen," she called out to him.

He swung about, nettled by a feeling of frustration. But he made no movement towards her. She lay with her hand supporting her head, studying him out of veiled eyes.

"Come here," she said in a strangely altered voice.

Slowly he crossed to her side, puzzling as to what unknown hand could be wringing the glory out of a situation from which he had once anticipated both rapture and triumph. She too seemed to feel that something was lacking from that encounter, something rare and indefinable, something already vanished and evaporated. She dropped back on her pillow, almost listlessly, and lay there for a moment or two without speaking.

"Do you love me?" she finally demanded.

"You know I do," was Storrow's retort.

"But are you sure? "

"I'm trying to prove it."

"How?"

"By asking you to marry me," he contended, wondering at the combative note which he could not keep from his voice.

"What difference can that make?" she demanded.