Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/277

 glow of warm light. Half-way down the stairs candles burned in sconces against the dull paneling. From below drifted the faint sound of music. . . a Debussy nocturne being played with caressing fingers in the shadowy, dim-lit spaces of the drawing-room.

"Paul is here," observed Ellen and led the way down the long stairs.

Lily followed and close at her silver heels Willie Harrison, divested now of his derby and umbrella. Half-way down, he paused for a moment and Lily, conscious that he had ceased to follow her, waited too. As she turned she saw that he was listening. There was a strange blurred look in his pale eyes the look of one awaking from a long sleep.

"It's beautiful," he said reverently. "My God! It's beautiful!" A kind of dignity seized him. He was no longer gauche and timid. He stared at Lily who stood with her back to a mirror, the black and silver cloak thrown carelessly back from her voluptuous white shoulders, her handsome head crowned with gold bronze hair. And then all at once the tears shone in his eyes. He leaned against the paneling.

"I understand now," he said softly. "I understand . . . everything. I know now how little I must have counted. . . . me and all the Mills together."

And in Lily's eyes there was mirrored another picture. . . that of a vast resounding shed bright with flames and thick with the odor of soot and half-naked bodies. . . Willie, eternally fingering the ruby clasp of his watch chain, herself turning the rings round and round on her slim fingers, and in the distance the white, stalwart body of a young Ukrainian steel worker. . . a mere boy. . . but beautiful. Krylenko was his name. . . Krylenko. . . Krylenko. . . It was a long time ago, more than fourteen years. How time flew!

Lily's dusky blue eyes darkened suddenly and the tears brimmed over. Perhaps it came to her then for the first time. . . a sense of life, of a beautiful yet tragic unity, of a force which swept both of them along helplessly.

All at once she held her handkerchief, quite shamelessly, to her eyes. "We are beginning to be old, Willie," she said softly. "Do you feel it too?"