LITMIR.BIZ

      IX

      The dance was coming to an end, and the girls, some of them, followed by as many young men, strayed out between the waltzes into the conservatory, to escape the heat; after trying the air, they said it was no cooler, only damper, and rushed back at the first strain of the music for the last figure of the dance. Hope Hawberk stayed, and Langbrith stayed with her. “Why don’t you go back and look after your guests?” she challenged him.

      “ The guest that needs looking after most is here.” He broke a rose from the vine at his hand, and threw it across the little fountain at her, where she stood with her head framed in the pale greenery of a jasmine bush. She lifted herself, haughtily. “May I ask what you mean, Mr. Langbrith?” Suddenly, while he stood, mystified and sobered, by the severity of her tone, she brought one hand from behind her, where she had been keeping both, and dashed a rose in his face. She tried to escape by the path that led up to the dining-room door past the callas in the oval bed about the fountain. He was instantly there to meet her, to catch her by a slim wrist and hold her fast.

      “You witch!” he panted. “Oh, Hope, may I go home with you? The way we used to?”

      “Before you were such a great person?”

      “ Why do you say that to me?” he entreated.

      “Because—because you are hurting my wrist,” she answered, with a child’s willful inconsequence.

      He released it with all but his thumb and forefinger, and bent over it as if to see what harm he had done, while she stood passive. He kissed the red marks his fingers had left.

      “What next, Mr. Langbrith?” she said, with a feint of cold impersonality.

      “You know! Will you let me go home with you?”

      “You’re making me break your mother’s lilies!”

      “I don’t care for the lilies. I care for you, you, you! May I go home with you?”

      Another dash of the fitful April rain, which seemed to have gathered again, smote the glass roof; then it began to fall steadily. “You may lend me an umbrella,” she said.

      “Well, if I may go along to carry it.”

      “Oh, if you’re afraid of not getting it back!”

      “Yes, I can’t trust you.”

      “You’re hurting me again. Don’t make me cry. Everybody will know it,” she pleaded, releasing her wrist and passing her handkerchief over her eyes, with her face turned from the doors.

      “Ah, Hope!” he tried to catch her hands, but she whipped them behind her, the handkerchief still in one of them, and ran, while he followed slowly.

      The rain stopped again, before the dance was ended. The old people had gone home before, and the dancers now sallied out together into the air that had softened, since nightfall, under a sky where the moon sailed in seas of blue, among islands of white cloud. The girls started chattering, laughing, with meaningless cries, massing themselves at first, and then losing themselves from the group, one by one, and finding their way homeward with the young men who seemed to fall to their share, each as by divine accident.

      Langbrith and Hope Hawberk were the foremost to put a space between themselves and the others, and he pressed closer and closer to his side the hand she let lie on his arm. “Will you say it now?” he was insisting.

      “No more now than ever. What good would it do, I should like to know. ”

      “How delicious! All the good in the world!”

      “Well, I shall not. Why should you want me to be engaged to you?”

      “ Oh, if you’ll only say you love me, we’ll let the engagement go!”

      “Thank you! Well, we’ll let it go without my saying anything so silly.”

      “ But I may say that I love you.”

      “Yes, so long as you don’t mean it.”

      “ But I do mean it—I do, heart and soul. Hope, can’t you be serious? May I write to you from Cambridge when I get back. ”

      “How can I help that? I suppose the mail will have to bring your letters!”

      “ But will you answer them?”

      “Perhaps they won’t need answering.”

       “ Oh yes, they will. I shall ask questions.”

      “Well, I never could answer questions. That’s the one thing I can’t do.”

      “Then you don’t want me to write to you?”

      What an idea! I thought it was you that were doing the wanting.”

      “And I may?”

      “ Well, you may write one letter.”

      “Oh, how intoxicating you are, Hope!” He tried in his rapture to put his hand on hers, but it had slipped from his arm, and she was flying up the path before him. He followed after a moment of surprise; but, because she was fleet of foot, or because she had that little start of him, or because he felt the chase undignified, he did not overtake her till she had reached her gate. The little story-and-a-half house, overshadowed by two tall spruces, under the shoulder of the hill, was withdrawn only a few yards from the street, to which the gabled porch at the front-door brought it a few feet nearer.

      She put her hand, panting, on the gate, and he had his on her shoulder, laughing, when, with an instinct of another presence, rather than a knowledge, she turned vividly towards him, and put her hand to her lip. He checked his laughter, and at her formal “ Good-night ” he said, reluctantly, “ Well, goodnight,” and faltered outside the gate which she shut between them.

      “ Won’t you come in, Jim?” a voice called huskily from the darkness of the little portico, and before he could formulate his “ Oh no, thank you, Mr. Hawberk, it’s rather late,” the figure of a man advanced from its shadow. Around this figure Hope faded into the shadow it had left.

      “ It’s only nine,” Hawberk said. “ Come in, and we’ll have a bottle of champagne together. I’m just up from Boston, where I’ve been passing a week with some of your father’s old friends: gay people. I was out at Cambridge, where I met some of the college grandees. They gave me great accounts of you. I was coming round in the morning to see your mother. She’ll like to know direct from the university authorities that you are regarded as the most promising man there. I’ve been looking after an invention of mine, that I’ve succeeded in getting into good hands in Boston, and that will probably give me more money than I shall know what to do with. Have you ever thought of parting with the mills?”

      “I don’t believe I have, Mr. Hawberk,” Langbrith responded.

      “If you ever do,” Hawberk said, “let me know. I’ve had an idea of

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