RAY

She was enchantingly pretty, there was no doubt of that, thought Gay
as he watched her at dinner. He had rarely seen a face so radiant in
expression, and she had lost, he noticed, the touch of provincialism in
her voice and manner. To-night, for the first time, he felt that there
was a fawn-like shyness about her, as if her soul had flown startled
before his approach. Of her meeting with Abel in Applegate he knew
nothing, and while he discerned instinctively the softness and the
richness of her mood, it was but reasonable that he should attribute it
to a different and, as it happened, to a mistaken cause. He liked that
faint shadow of her lashes on her vivid cheeks, and while he drank his
coffee and cracked his nuts, he told himself, half humorously, that the
ideal love, after all, was a perpetual virgin in perpetual flight. As
he rose from the table, he remembered Blossom, and the pile of her
half-read letters in his travelling bag. "She's a dear good girl, and
just because I've got myself into a mess, I've no idea of behaving like
a cad to her," he thought.

That was downstairs in the hotel dining-room, and an hour later, when he
faced Molly alone in the little sitting-room, he repeated the phrase to
himself with an additional emphasis--for when the woman before him in
flesh and blood looked up at him with entreating eyes, like a child
begging a favour, the woman in his memory faded quickly into remoteness.

"What's the matter, little girl?" he asked.

"Oh, Jonathan, I must go back to Old Church--to-morrow!" she said.

"Why in thunder do you want to do that?"

"There's something I must see about. I can't wait. I never can wait when
I want anything."

"So I have observed. This something is so important, by the way, that
you haven't thought of it for six months?"

"Well, I've thought of it--sometimes," she admitted.

"Can't you tell me what it is, Molly?"

She shook her head. Her face was pink and her eyes shone; whatever it
was, it had obviously enriched her beauty.

"Tell me, little girl," he repeated and leaned closer. There had always
been something comfortable and warm in his nearness to her, and under
the influence of it, she felt tempted to cry out, "I want to go back to
find out if Abel still loves me! I am an idiot, I know, but I feel that
I shall die if I discover that he has got over caring. This suspense
is more than I can bear, yet I never knew until I felt it, how much he
means to me."