Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/149

 so singularly have hated to put the content of the neat pair of covers to any ocular test. A content bravely attested after all by his companion they indubitably had; which inscrutable fact still so sufficed him, even at the later hour we mention, that his thumb ignored any itch to press the small clasp again. By that time he might have recalled how little he had been aware of the miniature against his breast before its being there was in so odd a fashion disclosed; with its coming back to him as well that his unawareness might have struck the girl herself, and not less, at any rate, that he had noted their flushing together under the force of something tacit, something that wasn't quite, that wasn't verily at all, in their speech. He was nevertheless for the present not to review any one of the felicities that more and more assured his steps, and that still made him, in living them over, catch his breath a little, he was not to recur to them without a finer and finer joy, without a positive pride, in the growth of his wit. It had broken out quite brilliantly, this wit, in that production of the morocco case, and what had it done less with his finding the very rightest terms for putting it, while Molly listened, that if he hadn't been able to repay in kind the compliment of her beautiful offering this was because the kind, the article worth her acceptance, was alas not produced in America? He was later on to remember indeed how she had answered with a 135