Book unfold!"

He turned lightly away from the piano. He was smiling radiantly. He threw
out his arms with an air of inviting approval; but the gesture was to her
an invitation, a call. She was instantly on her knees beside him, drawing
his face down to hers. His low laughter rippled against her face as he put
his arms around her and drew her closer to him.

They were rejoicing in an atmosphere of dusky gold. The light from the
mediaeval lanterns fell on her hair and on his laughing face which glowed
as with a kind of universal good-will. A cloud of delicate incense seemed
to envelop them as their lips met.

And then the shadow fell. It fell when the door opened quietly and Harboro
came into the room.

He closed the door behind him and regarded them strangely--as if his face
had died, but as if his eyes retained the power of seeing.

Sylvia drew away from Runyon, not spasmodically, but as if she were moving
in her sleep. She left one hand on Runyon's sleeve. She was regarding
Harboro with an expression of hopeless bewilderment. She seemed incapable
of speaking. You would not have said she was frightened. You would have
thought: "She has been slain."

Harboro's lips were moving, but he seemed unable to speak immediately.

It was Sylvia who broke the silence.

"You shouldn't have tricked me, Harboro!" she said. Her voice had the
mournful quality of a dove's.

He seemed bewildered anew by that. The monstrous inadequacy of it was too
much for him. He had tricked her, certainly, and that wasn't a manly thing
to do. He seemed to be trying to get his faculties adjusted. Yet the words
he uttered finally were pathetically irrelevant, it would have seemed. He
addressed Runyon.

"Are you the sort of man who would talk about--about this sort of thing?"
he asked.

Runyon had not ceased to regard him alertly with an expression which can
be described only as one of infinite distaste--with the acute discomfort
of an irrepressible creature who shrinks from serious things.

"I am not," he said, as if his integrity were being unwarrantably
questioned.

Harboro's voice had been strained like that of a man who is dying of
thirst. He went on with a disconcerting change of tone. He was trying to
speak more vigorously, more firmly; but the result was like some talking
mechanism uttering words without shading them properly. "I suppose you are
willing to marry her?" he asked.

It was Sylvia who answered this. "He does not wish