had been rather
breathlessly observing the vacillations of someone whom she longed to
persuade but dared not: "Now--NOW, if he speaks, I shall say yes!"

He did not speak; but abruptly, and as startlingly to her as if she
had just dropped from a sphere whose inhabitants had other methods of
expressing their sympathy, he slipped his arm around her and bent his
keen ugly melting face to hers....

It was the lightest touch--in an instant she was free again. But
something within her gasped and resisted long after his arm and his lips
were gone, and he was proceeding, with a too-studied ease, to light a
cigarette and sweeten his coffee.

He had kissed her.... Well, naturally: why not? It was not the first
time she had been kissed. It was true that one didn't habitually
associate Streff with such demonstrations; but she had not that excuse
for surprise, for even in Venice she had begun to notice that he looked
at her differently, and avoided her hand when he used to seek it.

No--she ought not to have been surprised; nor ought a kiss to have been
so disturbing. Such incidents had punctuated the career of Susy Branch:
there had been, in particular, in far-off discarded times, Fred Gillow's
large but artless embraces. Well--nothing of that kind had seemed of
any more account than the click of a leaf in a woodland walk. It had
all been merely epidermal, ephemeral, part of the trivial accepted
"business" of the social comedy. But this kiss of Strefford's was what
Nick's had been, under the New Hampshire pines, on the day that had
decided their fate. It was a kiss with a future in it: like a
ring slipped upon her soul. And now, in the dreadful pause that
followed--while Strefford fidgeted with his cigarette-case and rattled
the spoon in his cup, Susy remembered what she had seen through the
circle of Nick's kiss: that blue illimitable distance which was at once
the landscape at their feet and the future in their souls....

Perhaps that was what Strefford's sharply narrowed eyes were seeing now,
that same illimitable distance that she had lost forever--perhaps he was
saying to himself, as she had said to herself when her lips left Nick's:
"Each time we kiss we shall see it all again...." Whereas all she
herself had felt was the gasping recoil from Strefford's touch, and an
intenser vision of the sordid room in which he and she sat, and of their
two selves, more distant from each other than if their embrace had been
a sudden th