ONE:[Pg 153]Mr Silverdale got up off the hearthrug where he had been sitting nursing his knees with miraculous celerity. She behind her hidden eyes heard{208} him and knew, she felt she knew, that in another moment would come the touch of his hands on hers as he took them, and bade her look at him. Perhaps he would say, Look at me, my darling; perhaps his delicious joking ways would even at this sublimest of moments still assert themselves and he would say Peep-o! But whatever he did would be delicious, would be perfect. But no touch came on her hands, and there was a long, an awful moment of dead silence, while behind poor Alices hands the dazzle died out of her vision. Before it was broken, she perceived that beyond a shadow of doubt he did not mean her, and both were tongue-tied, he in the shame of having provoked a passion he had no use for, she in the shame of having revealed the passion he had not invited. She had come to the wrong house: she was an unbidden guest who must be directed outside the front-door again.
FORE:
FORE:It was obvious by this time that the family lunch was going to be rather a stormy sort of passage, and Mrs Keeling had before this caught her husbands eye, and with dumb movements of her lips and querying eyebrows had communicated Champagne? to him, for it was known that when Mrs Goodford was in a worrying mood, a glass of that agreeable beverage often restored her to almost fatuous good humour. But her husband had replied aloud, Certainly not, and assumed his grimmest aspect. This did not look well: as a rule he was content to suffer Mrs Goodfords most disagreeable humours in contemptuous silence. Now and then, however, and his wife was afraid that this was one of those tempestuous occasions, he was in no mind to lie prone under insults levelled at him across his own table.
FORE:"Oh, no! No," he groaned, "it isn't that so much just now, though I know that to a true religionist like you the society of such a mere romanticist--"
