Page:Watch and Ward (Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878).djvu/187

184 "O, you shall be quiet enough," he answered; but he insisted that unless, meanwhile, she took some dinner, he should have her ill on his hands. They quitted the office, and he hailed a hack, which drove them over to the upper Broadway region, where they were soon established in a well-appointed restaurant. They made, however, no very hearty meal. Nora's hunger of the morning had passed away in fever, and Fenton himself was, as he would have expressed it, off his feed. Nora's head had begun to ache; she had removed her bonnet, and sat facing him at their small table, leaning wearily against the wall, her plate neglected, her arms folded, her bright expanded eyes consulting the uncertain future. He noted narrowly how much prettier she was; but more even than by her prettiness he was struck by her high spirit. This belonged to an order of things in which he felt no commission to dabble; but in a creature of another sort he was free to admire such a luxury of conscience. In man or woman the capacity then and there to act was the thing he most relished. Nora had not faltered and wavered; she had chosen, and here she sat. It was an irritation to him to feel that he was not the manner of man for whom such a girl would burn her ships; for, as he looked askance at her beautiful absent eyes, he more than suspected that there was a positive as well as a negative side to her refusal of her friend. Poor Roger had a happier counterpart. It was love, and not indifference, that had pulled the wires of her adventure. Fenton, as we have intimated, was one who, when it suited him, could ride rough-shod to his mark. "You have told me half your story," he said, "but your eyes tell the rest. You 'll not be Roger's wife, but you 'll not die an old maid."