Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/251

 arm. She regarded herself in the mirror with a face of satisfaction, directing with nimble fingers an errant lock of her hair.

"And now you'll be off, I suppose," she said, and turned on him laughing. "Well, Freddy, pluck up your heart and speak your best; you have a tongue as neat as any one when you like. Don't wear so lugubrious a countenance, dear—come!"

She kissed him lightly on the forehead, laying her hands on his shoulders, her eyes sparkling with excitement. Rosewarne put out his arms and caught her. His eyes devoured her. " Kiss me again, Dolly," he sputtered. "Kiss me again. Kiss me on the lips."

She laughed, a faint colour rose in her cheeks, and she struggled in his clutch. "Dolly, Dolly!" he pleaded. A frown of embarrassment gathered in her forehead.

"Do let me go," she said sharply.

He obeyed; his arms fell to his sides; wistfully he watched her withdraw. Stately in her flowing, rustling robes, receding from him, she sailed through the doorway, and with the loss of that fine vision the light and the flush fell from him, and all that remained was an ignoble figure with discoloured cheeks and sunken head. In that moment and with the chill of that departing grace fresh upon him, he regarded his tragic position plainly and without illusion. The poor rags of his last unvoiced hopes dropped from his outcast soul. He had deferred the story of his ruin, in part out of shame, but much, too, out of pity, and because of some shreds of confidence in his own fortunes. And yet, implicit in that silence he had kept, but unacknowledged in his own thoughts, had been the fear of her demeanour in the crisis. He knew her for a worldly woman, clad in great aspirations; he had taken the measure of her trivial vanities; he had sounded the shallows of her passionless heart; and still he had trusted, still he had nursed an empty