As he looked down at her in the silence that followed his words her mouth seemed to grow heavy. That fugitive, inscrutable something crept into her eyes once more; and all of a sudden his face grew deathly pale, and then flushed again.
He turned and made three steps toward the door.
"John!" she cried after him, with a note of pain in the cry. She had flung off the rug, and was leaning on her elbow. He looked from where he stood, hesitating.
He went slowly back, and bent over her once more. Her pleading lips were perilously close to his.
"Must you go?" she asked, sinking back in her weariness, and raising two arms from which the loose silken sleeves fell back. The next moment a vibrant tremor of exaltation swept over her.
"Don't go! Don't go!" she murmured. "Don't leave me!"
The two white arms came together and folded over him and drew him in like wings.
Time and the world were nothing to her then; time and the world were shut out from him. It was the lingering, long-delayed capitulation of the more impetuous, profounder love she had held back from him, of the finer and softer self she had all but famished in the citadel of her grim aspirations. She no longer allured him, or cared to allure him; she had nothing to seek of him thereafter; she had only the ruins of her broken life to give him.
And he, too--he felt those first thin needles of bliss that crept and projected themselves over the quiet waters of friendship, and he knew that a power not himself was transforming those waters of change and unrest and ebb and flow into the impenetrable solidity of love itself.
There we watched those troubled eyes, And her laughing face grow wan; And the birds sought other skies, And she knew her year--was gone!
This dog of a life--mongrel of joy and misery that it is!--"The Silver Poppy."
Cordelia had found, and with bewildered eyes was watching unfold, her first and only love. About the belated flowering of that tender and reluctant growth clung a touch of tragic bitter-sweetness; it seemed so poignantly ineffectual, so like the odorous second blossoming of orchards at the betraying breath of a St. Martin's summer.
Yet Cordelia's week in the little old French city on the St. Lawrence was, perhaps, the happiest week in all her life. It was not all pure happiness; it had its moments of pain--but it was enough. She felt within her some shy subliminal renewal, as silent yet as implacable as the insidious first workings of spring.