But she looked
wilfully down, and he could only come closer to her, with
a sudden muteness upon his ready lips, and a strange
new-born fear wrestling for possession of him. For in
that moment Janet, hitherto so simple, so approachable,
as it were so available, had become remote, difficult,
incomprehensible. Kendal invested her with the change in
himself, and quivered in uncertainty as to what it might
do with her. He seemed to have nothing to trust to but
that one glance for knowledge of the girl his love had
newly exalted; and still she stood before him looking
down. He took two or three vague steps into the middle
of the room, drawing her with him. In their nearness to
each other the silence between them held them
intoxicatingly, and he had her in his arms before he
found occasion to say, between his lingering kisses upon
her hair, "You can't go, Janet. You must stay--and marry
me."
* * * * * * * *
"I don't know," wrote Lawrence Cardiff in a postscript
to a note to Miss Bell that evening, "that Janet will
thank me for forestalling her with such all-important
news, but I can't resist the pleasure of telling you that
she and Kendal got themselves engaged, without so much
as a 'by your leave' to me, this afternoon.
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