It blundered in, leering and triumphant.
Men have been mistaken before now. Men have turned aside in the very
moment of victory. And Benis Spence was not a man who would beg or
importune. How easily he might have taken for refusal what was, in
effect, mere withdrawal. Had Mary retreated only that he might
pursue? And had the Someone Else been No One Else at all?
If this were so, and it seemed at least possible, the retreating
lady had been smartly punished. Serve her right--oh, serve her right
a thousand times for having dared to trifle! Desire wasted no pity
on her. But what of him? With merciless lucidity Desire's busy brain
created the missing acts which might have brought the professor's
tragedy of errors to a happy ending. It would have been so simple--
if Benis had only waited. Even pursuit would not have been required
of him. Mary, unpursued, would have come back; unasked, she might
have offered. But Benis had not waited.
Desire saw all this in the time that it took her to go down-stairs.
At the bottom of the stairs she faced its unescapable logic: if he
were free now, he might be happy yet.
How blind they had both been! He to believe that love had passed;
she to believe that love would never come. Desire paused with her
hand upon the library door. He was there. She could hear him talking
to Yorick. She had only to open the door . . . but she did not open
it. Yesterday the library had been her kingdom, the heart of her
widening world.
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