Stella had risen, and stood uncertainly at one corner of a
big reading table, repressing an impulse to fly, finding herself
stricken with a strange recurrence of the feeling she had first disliked
him for arousing in her,--a sense of needing to be on her guard, of
impending assertion of a will infinitely more powerful than her own.
But that was, she told herself, only a state of mind, and Fyfe put her
quickly at her ease. He came up to the table and seated himself on the
edge of it an arm's length from her, swinging one foot free. He looked
at her intently. There was no shadow of expression on his face, only in
his clear eyes lurked a gleam of feeling.
"Well, lady," he said at length, "you're looking fine. How goes
everything?"
"Fairly well," she answered.
"Seems odd, doesn't it, to meet like this?" he ventured. "I'd have
dodged it, if it had been politic. As it is, there's no harm done, I
imagine. Mrs. Abbey assured me we'd be free from interruption. If the
exceedingly cordial dame had an inkling of how things stand between us,
I daresay she'd be holding her breath about now."
"Why do you talk like that, Jack?" Stella protested nervously.
"Well, I have to say something," he remarked, after a moment's
reflection. "I can't sit here and just look at you. That would be rude,
not to say embarrassing."
Stella bit her lip.
"I don't see why we can't talk like any other man and woman for a few
minutes," she observed.
"I do," he said quietly.
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