turn--if it does come."

"Oh it will." But instead of beginning, he raises his eyes to her again.
This time there is a heaviness like sleep on both, a heaviness that draws
both together inaudibly and down, and down, as if they were sinking through
piled thickness on thickness of warm, sweet-scented grass. Odd faces come
into both minds and vanish as if flickered off a film--to Rose Severance,
a man narrow and flat as if he were cut out of thin grey paper, talking,
talking in a voice as dry and rattling as a flapping windowblind of their
"vacation" together and a house with a little garden where she can sew and
he can putter around,--to Ted, Elinor Piper, the profile pure as if it were
painted on water, passing like water flowing from the earth in springs,
in its haughty temperance, its retired beauty, its murmurous quiet--other
faces, some trembling as if touched with light flames, some calm, some
merely grotesque with longing or too much pleasure--all these pass. A great
nearness, fiercer and more slumbrous than any nearness of body takes their
place. It wraps the two closer and closer, a spider spinning a soft web out
of petals, folding the two with swathes and swathes of its heavy, fragrant
silk.

"Oh--mine--isn't anything," says Ted rather unsteadily, after the moment.
"Only looking at firelight and wanting to take the coals in my hands."

Rose's voice is firmer than his but her mouth is still moved with content
at the thing it has desired being brought nearer.

"I really can't prescribe on as little evidence as that," she says with
music come back to her voice in the strength of a running wave. "I can
only repeat what you told me. That there was something you needed--and
wanted"--she is mocking now--"and didn't have at present. And that you