Only I couldn't rest
until--until--"
His voice trailed huskily off into silence. The gloves in his left hand
were doubled and twisted in his uneasy fingers. Stella's eyes were
blurred.
"Well, I'm going," he said shortly. "Be good."
He slipped off the table and stood erect, a wide, deep-chested man,
tanned brown, his fair hair with its bronze tinge lying back in a smooth
wave from his forehead, blue eyes bent on her, hot with a slumbering
fire.
Without warning, he caught her close in his arms so that she could feel
the pounding of his heart against her breast, kissed her cheeks, her
hair, the round, firm white neck of her, with lips that burned. Then he
held her off at arm's length.
"That's how _I_ care," he said defiantly. "That's how I want you. No
other way. I'm a one-woman man. Some time you may love like that, and if
you do, you'll know how I feel. I've watched you sleeping beside me and
ached because I couldn't kindle the faintest glow of the real thing in
you. I'm sick with a miserable sense of failure, the only thing I've
ever failed at, and the biggest, most complete failure I can conceive
of,--to love a woman in every way desirable; to have her and yet never
have her."
He caught up his hat, and the door clicked shut behind him. A minute
later Stella saw him step into the tonneau of the car. He never looked
back.
And she fled to her own room, stunned, half-frightened, wholly amazed at
this outburst. Her face was damp with his lip-pressure, damp and warm.
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