eet.

The child furtively tested her coin, biting it as if to taste the
glitter, and Flora waited, lost, given up by herself, passively watching
for the room to be filled again with his presence. He was back after a
long minute, and this time took up his stand at the door, where, pushing
aside the tight-drawn curtain a little, from time to time he looked out
into the street. Sometimes his eyes followed the cracks of the
plastered wall, sometimes he studied the floor at his feet; every moment
she saw he was alert, expectantly watching and waiting; and though he
never looked at her sitting behind him, she felt his protection between
her and the darkening street. She sat in the shadow of it, feeling it
all around her, claiming her as it would claim her henceforth, from, the
world. A ghost of light glimmered along the curtains of the window, and
stopped, quivering, in the middle of the curtained door. Then he turned
about and beckoned her. Sheer weakness kept her sitting. He went to her,
took her face between his hands, and looked into it long and intently.

"You don't want to go!" The words fell from his lips like an accusal.
His sudden realization of what she felt held him there dumb with
disappointment. "You have won me," her look was saying, "and yet I have
immediately become a worthless thing, because I am going; and I don't
believe in going." She felt she had failed him--how cruelly, was written
in his face. But it was only for a moment that she made him hesitate.
The next he shook himself free.

"Well, come," he said.

She felt that all doors would fly open at his bidding. She felt herself
swept powerless at his will with all the yielding in her soul that she
had felt in her body when his arms were around her. He had taken her by
the hand--he was leading her out into the gusty night, where all lights
flared--the gas-lights marching up the street over the hill into the
unknown, and the lights gleaming at her like eyes in the dark bulk of
the carriage waiting before the door. It all glimmered before her--a
picture she might never see again--might not see after she passed
through the carriage door that gaped for her. The will that had swept
her out of the door was moving her beyond her own will, as it had moved
her that morning in the garden, beyond all things that she knew. There
was no feeling left in her but the despair of extreme surrender.

She found herself in the carriage. She saw his face in the carriage doo