Page:Wilson - Merton of the Movies (1922).djvu/310

 removed the small cloth hat, tossed it to a chair, and faced him silently.

The light from the other room shone across her eyes and revealed them to him shadowy and mysterious. Her face was set in some ominous control. At last she looked away from him and began in a strained voice, "If anything happens to me"

He thought it time to end this nonsense. She might be feverish, but it could be nothing so serious as she was intimating. He clutched the gift. "Sarah," he said lightly, "I got a little something for you—see what I mean?" He thrust the package into her weakly yielding hands.

She studied it in the dusk, turning it over and over. Then with no word to him she took it to the dining room where under the light she opened it. He heard a smothered exclamation that seemed more of dismay than the delight he expected, though he saw that she was holding the watch against her wrist. She came back to the dusk of the parlour, beginning on the way one of her little skipping dance steps, which she quickly suppressed. She was replacing the watch on its splendid couch of satin and closing the box.

"I never saw such a man!" she exclaimed with an irritation that he felt to be artificial. "After all you've been through, I should think you'd have learned the value of money. Anyway, it's too beautiful for me. And anyway, I couldn't take it—not to-night, anyway. And anyway"

Her voice had acquired a huskiness in this speech that now left her incoherent, and the light revealed a wetness in her eyes. She dabbed at them with a handkerchief.

"Of course you can take it to-night," he said in masterful tones, "after all you've done for me."

"Now you listen," she began. "You don't know all I've done for you. You don't know me at all. Suppose something came out about me that you didn't think I'd 'a' been guilty of. You can't ever tell about people in this business. You don't know me at all not one little bit. I might 'a' done lots of things that would turn you against me. I tell