As they sat down, Clytie said, "Now do tell me about Miss Gray. How is she?"
Clytie frowned and bit her lip, then shook her head silently. Then she remarked, as if to herself, "I like her. I'm sure she's fine."
"I wish I might see her," she went on, her eyes fixed on the mountains. "I'd like to do something for her. I might get her a position in my father's office, I'm sure, if she'd take it. I have a curious feeling, though, that it is she who will be more likely to do something for me."
"If she ever can, you may be sure she will. Fancy is true blue."
"You didn't--have any misunderstanding with her, did you?"
She seemed to notice his reluctance to explain, and did not pursue the subject.
She turned and her eyes fell upon his hand, which lay carelessly upon his knee. "Let me see your palm," she said impulsively. "I've never looked at it carefully. I suppose you've told your own fortune often enough."
He gave his left hand to her. She barely touched it, holding it lightly, but he felt the magnetism of the contact almost as a caress. "You'll find my line of fate shows that I'm to change my career," he remarked. "It's broken at the head line, you see, and begins over again."
She looked at it, and her expression changed subtly. It was as if she had found some secret satisfaction in his palm, some answer to her desires.
In his left hand it began near the root of the second finger, at the mount of Saturn, not, as he would have preferred, farther toward the index finger, at the mount of Jupiter. He wondered if that meant to her what it did, in his professional capacity, to him--an indication of more sensual tastes. Half its length was cobwebbed with tiny branches, and punctuated with islands; then it ran, deep and clear to the edge of the palm, almost straight. In his right palm the line was cleaner, simpler, undivided.
She had begun to color, faintly; she had turned her eyes from him. Into her loveliness had come a new element of charm. There was something special in it, something for him alone; it was as if she had been signaling to him, and he had not, till now, understood. Instantly every line in her body seemed to be imbued with a new grace, a new meaning, translating her spirit. He was too full of the inspiration to speak; he could only look at her, irradiated, as if he had never seen her before. To his admiration for her beauty, his respect for her character, his interest in her mind, there was added something more; the total was not to be accounted for by the sum of these. And the wonderful whole satisfied the divine fastidiousness of his nature. She was for him the supreme choice. Her mind worked like his. Her very size pleased him. He seemed to know her for the first time. He had desired her, before, for her beauty and her intelligence; he had thought calmly of love and marriage. But now he felt the supreme demand for possession, because----only because he _must_ have her--because nothing else in his life mattered.