d on the door.

She glanced at the fire and at him, irresolute. His breath quickened.
She too had passed into another phase. Was it the natural effect of
night, of solitude, of sex? At any rate, she sank softly into the
armchair opposite to that in which he had been sitting.

'Find me an exciting one, please.'

Langham shut the door securely, and went back to the bookcase, his hand
trembling a little as it passed along the books. He found _Villette_ and
offered it to her. She took it, opened it, and appeared deep in it at
once. He took the hint and went back to his Montaigne.

The fire crackled cheerfully, the wind outside made every now and then a
sudden gusty onslaught on their silence, dying away again as abruptly as
it had risen. Rose turned the pages of her book, sitting a little
stiffly in her long chair, and Langham gradually began to find Montaigne
impossible to read. He became instead more and more alive to every
detail of the situation into which he had fallen. At last seeing, or
imagining, that the fire wanted attending to, he bent forward and
thrust the poker into it. A burning coal fell on the hearth, and Rose
hastily withdrew her foot from the fender and looked up.

'I am so sorry!' he interjected. 'Coals never do what you want them to
do. Are you very much interested in _Villette_?'

'Deeply,' said Rose, letting the book, however, drop on her lap. She
laid back her head with a little sigh, which she did her best to check,
half way through. What ailed her to-night? She seemed wearied; for the
moment there was no fight in her with anybody. Her music, her beauty,
her mutinous mocking gaiety--these things had all worked on the man
beside her; but this new softness, this touch of childish fatigue, was
adorable.

'Charlotte Bronte wrote it out of her Brussels experience, didn't she?'
she resumed languidly. 'How sorry she must have been to come back to
that dull home and that awful brother after such a break!'

'There were reasons more than one that must have made her sorry to come
back,' said Langham reflectively. 'But how she pined for her wilds all
through! I am afraid you don't find your wilds as interesting as she
found hers?'

His question and his smile startled her.

Her first impulse was to take up her book again, as a hint to him that
her likings were no concern of his. But something checked it, probably
the new brilliancy of that look of his, which had suddenly grown so
personal, so manly.