第45章

Presently, however, his silence controlled the situation.The drift of his thoughts began to tell.He gazed fixedly at nothing in particular, as if he were thinking of something which concerned her not at all.His thoughts, however, spoke for themselves.She was very much aware that a climax was pending.

"Do you know," he said, "I have spent the happiest evenings in years since I have known you?"

"Have you?" she said, with assumed airiness, but still excited by the conviction which the tone of his voice carried.

"I was going to tell you the other evening," he added, "but somehow the opportunity slipped away."

Carrie was listening without attempting to reply.She could think of nothing worth while to say.Despite all the ideas concerning right which had troubled her vaguely since she had last seen him, she was now influenced again strongly in his favour.

"I came out here to-day," he went on, solemnly, "to tell you just how I feel--to see if you wouldn't listen to me."

Hurstwood was something of a romanticist after his kind.He was capable of strong feelings--often poetic ones--and under a stress of desire, such as the present, he waxed eloquent.That is, his feelings and his voice were coloured with that seeming repression and pathos which is the essence of eloquence.

"You know," he said, putting his hand on her arm, and keeping a strange silence while he formulated words, "that I love you?"

Carrie did not stir at the words.She was bound up completely in the man's atmosphere.He would have churchlike silence in order to express his feelings, and she kept it.She did not move her eyes from the flat, open scene before her.Hurstwood waited for a few moments, and then repeated the words.

"You must not say that," she said, weakly.

Her words were not convincing at all.They were the result of a feeble thought that something ought to be said.He paid no attention to them whatever.

"Carrie," he said, using her first name with sympathetic familiarity, "I want you to love me.You don't know how much I

need some one to waste a little affection on me.I am practically alone.There is nothing in my life that is pleasant or delightful.It's all work and worry with people who are nothing to me."

As he said this, Hurstwood really imagined that his state was pitiful.He had the ability to get off at a distance and view himself objectively--of seeing what he wanted to see in the things which made up his existence.Now, as he spoke, his voice trembled with that peculiar vibration which is the result of tensity.It went ringing home to his companion's heart.

"Why, I should think," she said, turning upon him large eyes which were full of sympathy and feeling, "that you would be very happy.You know so much of the world."

"That is it," he said, his voice dropping to a soft minor, "I

know too much of the world."

It was an important thing to her to hear one so well-positioned and powerful speaking in this manner.She could not help feeling the strangeness of her situation.How was it that, in so little a while, the narrow life of the country had fallen from her as a garment, and the city, with all its mystery, taken its place?