Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/54

Rh murmur of surprise that would certainly have ﬂattered Amherst’s mother if she could have heard it; but it had an opposite effect on the young man, who inwardly accused himself of having tried to disguise his trade by not putting on his everyday clothes.

“How stupid of me! I took you for—I had no idea; I didn’t expect Mr. Truscomb here,” his employer faltered in embarrassment; then their eyes met and both smiled.

“Mr. Truscomb sent me to tell you that he is ill, and will not be able to show you the mills today. I didn’t mean to ask for you—I was told to give the message to Mr. Langhope,” Amherst scrupulously explained, trying to repress the sudden note of joy in his voice.

He was subject to the unobservant man’s acute ﬂashes of vision, and Mrs. Westmore’s beauty was like a blinding light abruptly turned on eyes subdued to obscurity. As he spoke, his glance passed from her face to her hair, and remained caught in its meshes. He had never seen such hair—it did not seem to grow in the usual orderly way, but bubbled up all over her head in independent clusters of brightness, breaking, about the brow, the temples, the nape, into little irrelevant waves and eddies of light, with dusky hollows of softness where the hand might plunge. It takes but the throb of a nerve to carry such a complex impression from the eye to the mind, but the object of the [ 42 ]