"Mrs. Thorpe," he began, with significant deliberation, but smiling with his eyes to show the tenderness underlying his words--"would you mind if we didn't dress for dinner this evening, and if we dined in the little breakfast-room--or here, for that matter--instead of the big place?""Why, not at all, if you wish it, "she answered readily enough, but viewing him still with a puzzled glance.
"I'm full of new ideas," he explained, impulsively impatient of the necessity to arrange a sequence among his thoughts.
"I see great things ahead. It's all come to me in a minute, but I couldn't see it clearer if I'd thought it out for a year. Perhaps I was thinking of it all the time and didn't know it. But anyhow, I see my way straight ahead.
You don't know what it means to me to have something to do.
It makes another man of me, just to think about it.
Another man?--yes, twenty men! It's a thing that can be done, and by God! I'm going to do it!"She beheld in his face, as she scrutinized it, a stormy glow of the man's native, coarse, imperious virility, reasserting itself through the mask of torpor which this vacuous year had superimposed. The large features were somehow grown larger still; they dominated the countenance as rough bold headlands dominate a shore.
It was the visage of a conqueror--of a man gathering within himself, to expend upon his fellows, the appetites, energies, insensibilities, audacities of a beast of prey.
Her glance fluttered a little, and almost quailed, before the frank barbarism of power in the look he bent upon her. Then it came to her that something more was to be read in this look; there was in it a reservation of magnanimity, of protection, of entreating invitation, for her special self. He might tear down with his claws, and pull to pieces and devour others; but his mate he would shelter and defend and love with all his strength.
An involuntary trembling thrill ran through her--and then she smiled up at him.
"What is it you're going to do?" she asked him, mechanically.
Her mind roved far afield.
"Rule England!" he told her with gravity.
For the moment there seemed to her nothing positively incongruous in the statement. To look at him, as he loomed before her, uplifted by his refreshed and soaring self-confidence, it appeared not easy to say what would be impossible to him.
She laughed, after a fleeting pause, with a plainer note of good-fellowship than he had ever heard in her voice before.
"Delightful," she said gayly. "But I'm not sure that I quite understand the--the precise connection of morning-dress and dinner in a small room with the project." He nodded pleased comprehension of the spirit in which she took him.
"Just a whim," he explained. "The things I've got in mind don't fit at all with ceremony, and that big barn of a room, and men standing about. What I want more than anything else is a quiet snug little evening with you alone, where Ican talk to you and--and we can be together by ourselves.
You'd like it, wouldn't you?"
She hesitated, and there was a novel confession of embarrassment in her mantling colour and down-spread lashes.
It had always to his eyes been, from the moment he first beheld it, the most beautiful face in the world--exquisitely matchless in its form and delicacy of line and serene yet sensitive grace. But he had not seen in it before, or guessed that there could come to it, this crowning added loveliness of feminine confusion.
"You would like it, wouldn't you?" he repeated in a lower, more strenuous tone.
She lifted her eyes slowly, and looked, not into his, but over his shoulder, as in a reverie, half meditation, half languorous dreaming. She swayed rather than stepped toward him.
"I think," she answered, in a musing murmur,--"I think I shall like--everything."
