THREE:
THREE:"If I tell you something, will you never tell?"But other things extraneous to the temple had come in with him as he entered, like flies through an opened door, and still buzzed about him. His wifes want of comprehension was one of them. It was not often that Mrs Goodford had the power to annoy him so thoroughly as she had done to-day, but when she did, all that Emmeline had to contribute to the situation was such a sentence as, What a pity you and Mamma worry each other so. She did not understand, and though he told himself that in thirty years he should have got used to that, he found now and then, and to-day with unusual vividness, that he had not done so. She had never become a companion to him; he had never found in her that for which ultimately a man is seeking, though at the time he may not know it, when he goes a-wooing. A mouth, an eyebrow, the curve of a limb may be his lure, and having attained it he may think for a few years of passion that in gaining it he has gained what he sought, but unless he has indeed got that which unconsciously he desired, he will find some day when the gray ash begins to grow moss-like on his burning coals, that though his children{35} are round him, there is but a phantom opposite to him. The romance of passion has burned itself out, and from the ashes has no ph?nix arisen with whom he can soar to the sun. He desired the mouth or the eyebrow: he got them, and now in the changing lineaments he can scarcely remember what that which so strangely moved him was like, while in the fading of its brightness nothing else has emerged.
THREE:Have you them ready for me now? he asked, keeping the farce up."Oh, well, you may be right there," blustered Allingham, "I don't know. I admit I'm not quite up to date in these abstruse speculations."
TWO:She dropped a hand to Ferry's to receive again the neglected letter, and chanced to take it by the corner that held the ring. With that she stared at us, fingered it, rended the envelope, gave one glance to her own name engraved inside a plain gold ring of the sort New Orleans girls bestow upon those to whom they are betrothed, and springing to the ground between our two candles, bent over the open page and cried through a flood of tears, "Oh, God, have mercy on him, he is gone! He is gone, Edgard! Oh, Edgard, he is gone at last; gone beyond all doubt, and our hands--our hands and our hearts are clean!"She had been working that day at the table in his big room and stood there tidying it. Then she went back into the small room adjoining, and he heard her rustle into her mackintosh. Then returning she stood at the door of it a moment and from underneath his half raised eyes, he saw that she looked slowly all round his room, as if, perhaps, searching for something, or as if rather committing it to her memory. Then without another word to him she went out, and he heard her steps tapping along the cement-floored corridor to the lift. Once they paused, and he half-longed, half-dreaded that she was coming back. They began again, and stopped, and immediately afterwards he heard the clang of the grille, and the faint rumble of the descending lift. He had one overpowering impulse that brought him to his feet, to dash downstairs, and see her go out, or if she was gone already to follow her into the street, just for the sake of setting eyes on her once more, but it took him no further than that, and presently he sat down again.
TWO:"No, not so much," said Miss Harper, with a gleam of pride; and thereupon it was my amazement to hear Charlotte begin guardedly to sing:Gholson's eyes turned green. "Does Ned Ferry give that as his reason?"