ler flowers
leant their rose blush to the winking candles. She was seated at the
keys in a gown, gauzy white, with two dreamy hands expressing some
twilight theme of Schumann's--a reverie of sorrow and sighing. He sat
passive, but it was the passivity of the spinning-top. His greedy eyes
looked at the wandering fingers and longed to detain them, leant on the
mignonette which cast a languid breath from the muslin folds of her
bodice--fastened gladly, almost possessively, on the tiny blue speck
that marred the outline of her under lip. Poor sweet speck! Oh, that it
might there remain for ever as seal royal of the eternity of his truth!
At last she lifted her hands and rose. He rose in sympathy and advanced,
half afraid; restrained by the indefinable awe with which we all
approach joys that are too delicious to be seized.

For a moment she scanned him earnestly but not regretfully, and, as she
gazed, she noted the passage of his eyes as they travelled
conqueror-wise to the dark flaw on the margin of her mouth. His glance
let loose the words that had swelled her heart with pent-up purpose.

She held out her hand. He grasped it eagerly; but there was a stiff
wrist and elbow at the back of it which dictated the distance from him
to her.

"Yate--Mr Tyndall--I want you to go away!"

"What!--now?--this moment?"

"Yes, and for ever!"

She spoke deliberately, without a quaver of sorrow, and every word on
his heart spat like hailstones coming down a chimney on live coal.

His huge frame trembled and swayed an instant. Then he laughed. It was a
jarring, joyless convulsion.

"You don't mean it--you are doing it to try me--say you don't, Carol, my
darling."

"But I do," she explained. "Listen. I have behaved infamously to you. I
will take all the blame. You were so good, so noble, so loving. You came
just when I was dying of heartbreak--people do die of it, no matter what
the philosophers say. You saved me, you lifted me to life and womanly
pride, you prevented me from writing cringing letters to----in short you
saved me from throwing myself at Mr Rosser's head. Nay, don't speak. I
told you I had loved him."

"You love him still!" he cried.

"No. I showed you my letter this evening to prove it. But that is no
reason for loving you."

"But you'll try and love me? I would make you--you said I might," he
murmured, as though coaxing trust from a child.

"No," she said, disengaging her hand and brushing it across her eyes