Then a door creaked in the hall, there was a rustle of silken skirts
on the carpet, and Molly, having dried her tears, came in, pliant,
blushing, and eager to please them both.
CHAPTER VI
IN WHICH HEARTS GO ASTRAY
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.
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