Page:The time spirit; a romantic tale (IA timespiritromant00snaiiala).pdf/319

 *science may have inspired her; at any rate she had no need to reproach herself just then. She could look the whole world in the face. Her attitude had been sensitively correct; if other people did not appreciate that simple fact, so much the worse for other people!

A long five minutes they waited in that large and dismal room, a slight flush of anxiety upon their faces, their hearts beating a little wildly, no doubt. In all that time not a word passed between them; the tension was almost more than they could bear. If Fate had kept till the last one final scurvy trick it would be too horrible! And then suddenly, in the midst of this grim thought, an old man came hobbling painfully in. Both were struck at once by the look of him. There was something in the bearing, in the manner, in the play of the rather exquisite face which spoke to them intimately. For a reason deeply obscure, which Jack and Mary were very far from comprehending, the welcome he gave her was quite touching. It was full of a simple kindness, spontaneous, unstudied, oddly caressing.

Jack, amazed not a little by the heart-on-the-sleeve attitude of this old barbarian, could only ascribe it to the desire of a finished man of the world to put the best possible face on an impossible matter. Yet, somehow, that cynical view did not seem to cover the facts of the case.

In a way that hardly belonged to a tyrant and an autocrat, the old man took one of the girl's hands into the keeping of his poor enfeebled ones, and was still holding it when his sister and his eldest daughter came into the room. Both ladies were firm in the belief that this was the most disagreeable moment of their lives.