She was angry, and the
pose suited her. The slight hardness of her expression was lost in the
dim blue twilight which still waited for the moon. Vine, an unemotional
man, felt with a curious strength the charm of this isolation on the
housetop, this tranquillity, so much more suggestive of solitude than
anything which could be realized within the walls of a room. He shivered
a little when he saw how close she was to the low parapet, and he held
out his hand. She took it at once, and her face softened.
"Dear Norris," she said, "forgive me if I am disagreeable, but think
what I went through to get that paper. Think how I have hoped that it
might mean everything to you, perhaps to us."
She faltered, and it was in his mind then to speak the words which she
had waited so long to hear from him, and yet he hesitated. He was a man
who loved his freedom, not perhaps in the ordinary sense of the word,
but he had still an almost passionate objection to lessening in any
degree his individual hold upon life, to giving any one else a permanent
right to share its struggles and its ambitions. He owed it to her, he
was very sure of that, and yet he hesitated.
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