The Tempting of Tavernake | Page 8

business, you see.
To-day I am a sort of manager. In eighteen months' time--perhaps
before that if they do not offer me a partnership--I shall start for
myself."
Once more the subtlest of smiles flickered at the corners of her lips.
"Do they know yet?" she asked, with faint irony.
"Not yet," he replied, with absolute seriousness. "They might tell me to
go, and I have a few things to learn yet. I would rather make
experiments for some one else than for myself. I can use the results
later; they will help me to make money."
She laughed softly and wiped the tears out of her eyes. They were
really very beautiful eyes notwithstanding the dark rims encircling
them.
"If only I had met you before!" she murmured.
"Why?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"Don't ask me," she begged. "It would not be good for your conceit, if
you have any, to tell you."
"I have no conceit and I am not inquisitive," he said, "but I do not see
why you laughed."
Their period of waiting came to an end at this point. The fish was
brought and their conversation became disjointed. In the silence which
followed, the old shadow crept over her face. Once only it lifted. It was
while they were waiting for the cutlets. She leaned towards him, her
elbows upon the tablecloth, her face supported by her fingers.
"I think that it is time we left these generalities," she insisted, "and you
told me something rather more personal, something which I am very
anxious to know. Tell me exactly why so self-centered a person as

yourself should interest himself in a fellow-creature at all. It seems odd
to me."
"It is odd," he admitted, frankly. "I will try to explain it to you but it
will sound very bald, and I do not think that you will understand. I
watched you a few nights ago out on the roof at Blenheim House. You
were looking across the house-tops and you didn't seem to be seeing
anything at all really, and yet all the time I knew that you were seeing
things I couldn't, you were understanding and appreciating something
which I knew nothing of, and it worried me. I tried to talk to you that
evening, but you were rude."
"You really are a curious person," she remarked. "Are you always
worried, then, if you find that some one else is seeing things or
understanding things which are outside your comprehension?"
"Always," he replied promptly.
"You are too far-reaching," she affirmed. "You want to gather
everything into your life. You cannot. You will only be unhappy if you
try. No man can do it. You must learn your limitations or suffer all your
days."
"Limitations!" He repeated the words with measureless scorn. "If I
learn them at all," he declared, with unexpected force, "it will be with
scars and bruises, for nothing else will content me."
"We are, I should say, almost the same age," she remarked slowly.
"I am twenty-five," he told her.
"I am twenty-two," she said. "It seems strange that two people whose
ideas of life are as far apart as the Poles should have come together like
this even for a moment. I do not understand it at all. Did you expect
that I should tell you just what I saw in the clouds that night?"
"No," he answered, "not exactly. I have spoken of my first interest in
you only. There are other things. I told a lie about the bracelet and I

followed you out of the boarding-house and I brought you here, for
some other for quite a different reason."
"Tell me what it was," she demanded.
"I do not know it myself," he declared solemnly. "I really and honestly
do not know it. It is because I hoped that it might come to me while we
were together, that I am here with you at this moment. I do not like
impulses which I do not understand."
She laughed at him a little scornfully.
"After all," she said, "although it may not have dawned upon you yet, it
is probably the same wretched reason. You are a man and you have the
poison somewhere in your blood. I am really not bad-looking, you
know."
He looked at her critically. She was a little over-slim, perhaps, but she
was certainly wonderfully graceful. Even the poise of her head, the
manner in which she leaned back in her chair, had its individuality. Her
features, too, were good, though her mouth had grown a trifle hard. For
the first time the dead pallor of her cheeks was relieved by a touch of
color. Even Tavernake realized that there were great possibilities about
her. Nevertheless, he shook his head.
"I do