At these words his genius turned and looked at him with eyes ominous and aghast.  He had a vision of another woman kneeling beside a hearth as her hands tended a dying fire.  And he hardly saw the woman at his side as he drew her to him and kissed her again because of the pain at his heart.  And Flossie wondered why in that moment he did not look at her.

He was looking now.  And as he looked his genius hid his face.

“You knew that was what I wanted?”

She shook her head slowly.  “What does that mean?  That you didn’t know?  Or that you won’t?  But you will, Flossie?”

As he drew her to him a second time the old terror woke in his heart; but only for a moment.  For this time Flossie kissed him of her own accord, with a kiss, not passionate like his own, but sweet and fugitive.  It was like a reminder of the transience of the thing he sought, a challenge rousing him to assert its immortality.

He put her from him, and stooped over his own outstretched arms and clasped hands; staring stupidly at the floor.  When he spoke again it was hardly, incisively, as a man speaks the truth he hates.  “Do you know what this means?  It means waiting.”

“Waiting?”

“Yes.  I’m not a bit well off, you know; I couldn’t give you the sort of home you ought to have just yet.  I’d no business to say anything about it; but somehow I thought you’d rather know.  And of course I’ve no business to ask you, but—­will you wait?”

“Well—­if we must, we must.”

“And if it means working at that beastly Bank for another year, do you think you can keep it up so long?”

“I’ll try to.”

She leaned towards him, and they sat there, holding each other’s hands, looking into each other’s eyes, hearing nothing, feeling nothing, but the beating of their own riotous hearts.

It was love as nature loves to have it.  It was also what men call honest love.  But in the days when he had loved dishonestly, he had never slipped from Poppy Grace’s side with such a sense of misery and solitude and shame.

CHAPTER XLVII

The game was over and Flossie had won.  She had forced Fate’s hand, or rather, Mr Rickman’s.  Not by any coarse premeditated methods; Flossie was too subtly feminine for that.  She had trusted rather to the inspiration of the moment, and when her beautiful womanly emotions gave her the opening she had simply followed it, that was all.  And could anything have been more correct?  She had not “given herself away” once by word or look.  With true maidenly modesty she had hidden her own feelings until she was perfectly sure of Mr. Rickman’s.  There was nothing—­nothing to make her feel ashamed when she looked back upon that day; a reflection from which she derived much consolation afterwards.

It gave her courage to fly downstairs to Mrs. Downey’s private room where that lady sat doing her accounts, to lean over the back of Mrs. Downey’s chair and to whisper into her ear, “I’ve been dusting Mr. Rickman’s books, He caught me at it.”