Presently Sam Carr drew Tommy away to the library to look up some legal technicality over which they had fallen into dispute.  Sophie lay back in her chair, eyes fixed on the red glow of the embers as if she saw through them and into vast distances beyond.

And Thompson sat covertly looking at her profile, the dull gold of her coiled hair, the red-lipped mouth that was made for kisses and laughter—­and he was glad just to look at her, to be near.  For he was beginning to say to himself that it was no good fighting against fate, that this girl had put some spell on him from which he would never be wholly free.  Nor did he, in that mood, desire to be free.  He wanted that spell to grow so strong that in the end it would weave itself about her too, make love beget love.  There was quickening in him again that desire to pursue, to conquer, to possess.  The ego in him whispered that once for a moment Sophie had rested like a homing bird in his arms, and would, again.  But he was not to be betrayed by headlong impulse.  The time was not yet.  Instinct warned him that in some fashion, vague, unrevealed, he had still to prove himself to Sophie Carr.  He was aware intuitively that she weighed him in the balance of cold, critical reason, against any emotional appeal—­just as he, himself, was learning to weigh things and men.  He did not know this.  He only felt it.  But he felt sure of his instinct where she was concerned.

And so he was content, for the time, with the privilege of being near her.  Some day—­

Sophie looked at him.  For the moment his own gaze had wandered from her to the fire, his mind yielding tentatively to rose-tinted visions.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she said lightly.

“I was thinking of you,” he answered truthfully.

He looked up as he spoke and his heart leaped at the faint flush that rose slowly over Sophie’s face.  Indeed all the high resolve that had been shaping in his soul for the past ten minutes came near going by the board.  It would have been so easy to imprison the hand that lay along the chair-arm next his own, to utter words that trembled on his tongue, to break through the ice that Sophie used as a shield—­for the instant he felt sure of that—­and dare what fires burned beneath.

While he stood, poised as it were, upon the tip-toe of indecision, Carr and Tommy Ashe came back.

Afterward, on his way home, Thompson wondered at the swift challenging glance Tommy shot at Sophie in that moment.  As if Tommy detected some tensity of feeling that he resented.

CHAPTER XXII

SUNDRY REFLECTIONS