He dropped on his knees beside her and caught her hands. She could see the sudden flame of tumultuous love and of desire that burned through him, and she drew away, strangely, almost in terror.
"No, no!" she cried in a low voice. "Not now! Not here!"
She pressed away from him, as from a danger, though on his face was nothing but tenderness and pleading. She shrank from him hesitatingly, as though the cup of devotion that he held up to her was something too costly for her to taste.
A hurrying and startled chambermaid turning on the light brought them back from that garden of enchantment into which youth can wander but seldom. There was nothing left for them to do but walk soberly down through the long halls of the quiet house to the library once more. Yet all the while Cordelia seemed to be fighting some silent and inward battle, to be swayed by some great conflict of emotion that trampled from her the many long-thought-of things she had to say, as cavalry tramples a field once golden with wheat.
She was silent and restless and nervous until Hartley gathered up the scattered pages of The Unwise Virgins and put them in order on the library table. Then she looked into his eyes and murmured tenderly, and under the stress of a sudden impulse:
"I'm proud of you, so proud of you, my big boy!"
He looked down into her face--into her face, that he felt could change like water. It was dignified, glorified by a light that he had seldom seen on a woman's countenance, and it left him happy once more. The artist in him, receiving its dole, elbowed the man in him slowly aside.
"It is all strength and all beauty," she said simply. Then she added in another voice, "You have made me very humble."
She sighed pitifully as she looked at the pile of written pages.
"Yes. All along it was The Silver Poppy that was my model--that I tried to follow from first to last."
"I feel as though you had given me a mental flogging," she broke in. "None of this is mine! _None_ of it," she cried passionately. "None of it, by right," she added as she gazed at the topmost sheet. "I was only the mouse who pulled the thorn out of the lion's paw, and look what he has done for me."
"But see what you have done, what you are doing for _me_!" he cried impetuously. "And see what you can do, what some day you must do."