“I came to find you!” he said; still huskily but not so huskily as before. There are degrees of huskiness, and Derek’s was sharpened a little by a touch of irritation.
“Yes?” said Jill.
Derek was now fermenting. What she ought to have said, he did not know, but he knew that it was not “Yes?” “Yes?” in the circumstances was almost as bad as “Really?”
There was a pause. Jill was looking at him with a frank and unembarrassed gaze which somehow deepened his sense of annoyance. Had she looked at him coldly, he could have understood and even appreciated it. He had been expecting coldness, and had braced himself to combat it. He was still not quite sure in his mind whether he was playing the role of a penitent or a King Cophetua, but in either character he might have anticipated a little temporary coldness, which it would have been his easy task to melt. But he had never expected to be looked at as if he were a specimen in a museum, and that was how he was feeling now. Jill was not looking at him—she was inspecting him, examining him, and he chafed under the process.
Jill, unconscious of the discomfort she was causing, continued to gaze. She was trying to discover in just what respect he had changed from the god he had been. Certainly not in looks. He was as handsome as ever,—handsomer, indeed, for the sunshine and clean breezes of the Atlantic had given him an exceedingly becoming coat of tan. And yet he must have changed, for now she could look upon him quite dispassionately and criticize him without a tremor. It was like seeing a copy of a great painting. Everything was there, except the one thing that mattered, the magic and the glamour. It was like — She suddenly remembered a scene in the dressing-room when the company had been in Baltimore. Lois Denham, duly the recipient of the sunburst which her friend Izzy had promised her, had unfortunately, in a spirit of girlish curiosity, taken it to a jeweller to be priced, and the jeweller had blasted her young life by declaring it a paste imitation. Jill recalled how the stricken girl—previous to calling Izzy on the long distance and telling him a number of things which, while probably not news to him, must have been painful hearing—had passed the vile object round the dressing-room for inspection. The imitation was perfect. It had been impossible for the girls to tell that the stones were not real diamonds. Yet the jeweller, with his sixth sense, had seen through them in a trifle under ten seconds. Jill come to the conclusion that her newly-discovered love for Wally Mason had equipped her with a sixth sense, and that by its aid she was really for the first time seeing Derek as he was.
Derek had not the privilege of being able to read Jill’s thoughts. All he could see was the outer Jill, and the outer Jill, as she had always done, was stirring his emotions. Her daintiness afflicted him. Not for the first, the second, or the third time since they had come into each other’s lives, he was astounded at the strength of the appeal which Jill had for him when they were together, as contrasted with its weakness when they were apart. He made another attempt to establish the scene on a loftier plane.
“What a fool I was!” he sighed. “Jill! Can you ever forgive me?”
He tried to take her hand. Jill skilfully eluded him.
“Why, of course I’ve forgiven you, Derek, if there was anything to forgive.”
“Anything to forgive!” Derek began to get into his stride. These were the lines on which he had desired the interview to develop. “I was a brute! A cad!”
“Oh, no!”
“I was. Oh, I have been through hell!”
Jill turned her head away. She did not want to hurt him, but nothing could have kept her from smiling. She had been so sure that he would say that sooner or later.
“Jill!” Derek had misinterpreted the cause of her movement, and had attributed it to emotion. “Tell me that everything is as it was before.”