Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/404

 Taking the girl by her shoulders, gently, reverently indeed, he lifted her out of his embrace, his head shaking slowly from side to side, his eyes in hers, aglow with tenderness but no beam of responsive love.

The girl saw—she read his answer; there was no need to speak it. And then it was that the stoic came out in her again! Henry saw for a moment pain-filled eyes, pain-constricted lips, one dark moment of wicked resentment instantly conquered, and then, nostrils quivering, the whole dramatized struggle of pride crushing the show of suffering, battling resolutely till it ironed out even the sullen lines of defeat about the mouth.

Harrington had never felt so tenderly for Lahleet, never felt such devotion to her; and yet never dared so little to show any feeling of softness. He perceived that it would not do—it would be unkind.

Her self-control proved the greater, and it was she who spoke first, from some immeasurable sublimated height of renunciation to which she had been lifted by the trueness of her love for him. "Go your way, white man," she said gravely, in a deep throaty voice that was strange to her, "into the high places that are waiting for you. I go mine—back to the blanket!"

"No, no!" protested Henry sharply. "You are not savage. You are a woman—one of the finest, noblest, most inspiring! Everything that woman can be, you can be!"

"But not to you," she answered with a bitter smile.

"To me?" he asked, bitter also. "Who am I?"

Without daring another word, another touch—so they prepared to part: thwarted in love, cemented in friendship. Henry turned the corner, she following at