Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/114

 her, look poor and ugly; so that what it suddenly came back to for him was his deficiency in the things a man of any taste, so engaged, so enlisted, would have liked to make sure of being able to show—imagination, tact, positively even humour. The circumstance is doubtless odd, but the truth is none the less that the speculation uppermost with him at this juncture was: "What if I should begin to bore this creature?" And that, within a few seconds, had translated itself. "If you'll swear again you love me!"

She looked about, at door and window, as if he were asking for more than he said. "Here? There's nothing between us here," Kate smiled.

"Oh, isn't there?" Her smile itself, with this, had so settled something for him that he had come to her pleadingly and holding out his hands, which she immediately seized with her own, as if both to check him and to keep him. It was by keeping him thus for a minute that she did check him; she held him long enough; while, with their eyes deeply meeting, they waited in silence for him to recover himself and renew his discretion. He coloured, as with a return of the sense of where they were, and that gave her precisely one of her usual victories, which immediately took further form. By the time he had dropped her hands he had again taken hold, as it were, of Milly's. It was not, at any rate, with Milly he had broken. "I'll do all you wish," he declared as if to acknowledge the acceptance of his condition 104