at much she heard as she turned away
with a fear lest it might, and a hope that it would be, too much for
him!

She lingered away to the door, through whose upper glazed half she saw
the street swarming and sunny, picked out with streamers of red and
squares of green. The murmur of traffic outside was faint to her ears.
The murmur of the two voices talking on inside the shop momently grew
fainter. She looked behind her and saw them now in the back of the shop,
close by the grinning brazier.

The light of it showed what would have been otherwise dark. It showed
her Harry, straddling, hands in pockets, hat thrust back, a silhouette
as hard as if cast in cold metal. The aspect of him, thus, was strange,
not quite unlike himself, but giving her the feeling that she had never
known how much Harry smoothed over.

Perhaps men were always like that with men. Still she looked away again
because she felt she had taken a liberty in catching him when he was
coming out so plain and coming out so positive to the shopkeeper, whom
he seemed really to be bullying. She felt that, considering the
sapphire, nothing that went on about it could be too extraordinary. And
yet the tone their voices were taking on made her nervous. Whatever they
were arguing about, she found it hard to go on standing thus with her
back to it, and for so long, while her expectancy tightened, and her
unreasonable idea that she did not want the ring, more and more took
hold of her. If he did not want to sell it, why not let it go--the
beautiful thing!

She thought she would call Harry, and suggest it--but no. She hesitated.
She would give them a chance to finish it themselves. She would count
ten pigtails past the window first. She watched the last far into the
distance, and still she was there, blowing hot and cold. She would call
to Harry--call out to him from where she stood, that she wouldn't have
the thing.

She turned, and there they were yet. They had not moved. The shadow of
the gesticulating little Chinaman danced like a bird on the wall, and
before him Harry glowed, immovable, but ruddy, as if the hard metal
whereof he was cast was slowly heating through. The thought came to her
then. Harry was iron! The hard shade of his profile on the wall, the
stiff movement of his lips, the forward thrust of his head on his
shoulders gave her another thought. Was Harry also brutal? The sight of
that brutality awake, feeding, as it were, on the fluttering little