Part 25 (2/2)

”Miss Thorn is--she--indeed, she will be back in a moment. How do you do?

Dreadful weather, is not it?”

”Oh, it is only a snowstorm,” said Sybil, brus.h.i.+ng a few flakes from her furs as she came near the fire. ”We do not mind it at all here. But of course you never have snow in England.”

”Not like this, certainly,” said Ronald. ”Let me help you,” he added, as Sybil began to remove her cloak.

It was a very sudden change of company for Ronald; five minutes ago he was trying, very clumsily and hopelessly, to console Joe Thorn in her tears, feeling angry enough with himself all the while for having caused them.

Now he was face to face with Sybil Brandon, the most beautiful woman he remembered to have seen, and she smiled at him as he took her heavy cloak from her shoulders, and the touch of the fur sent a thrill to his heart, and the blood to his cheeks.

”I must say,” he remarked, depositing the things on a sofa, ”you are very courageous to come out, even though you are used to it.”

”You have come yourself,” said Sybil, laughing a little. ”You told me last night that you did not come here every day.”

”Oh--I told my cousin I had come because I was so lonely at the hotel. It is amazingly dull to sit all day in a close room, reading stupid novels.”

”I should think it would be. Have you nothing else to do?”

”Nothing in the wide world,” said Ronald with a smile. ”What should I do here, in a strange place, where I know so few people?”

”I suppose there is not much for a man to do, unless he is in business.

Every one here is in some kind of business, you know, so they are never bored.”

Ronald wished he could say the right thing to reestablish the half-intimacy he had felt when talking to Sybil the night before. But it was not easy to get back to the same point. There was an interval of hours between yesterday and to-day--and there was Joe.

”I read novels to pa.s.s the time,” he said, ”and because they are sometimes so like one's own life. But when they are not, they bore me.”

Sybil was fond of reading, and she was especially fond of fiction, not because she cared for sensational interests, but because she was naturally contemplative, and it interested her to read about the human nature of the present, rather than to learn what any individual historian thought of the human nature of the past.

”What kind of novels do you like best?” she asked, sitting down to pa.s.s the time with Ronald until Josephine should make her appearance.

”I like love stories best,” said Ronald.

”Oh, of course,” said Sybil gravely, ”so do I. But what kind do you like best? The sad ones, or those that end well?”

”I like them to end well,” said Ronald, ”because the best ones never do, you know.”

”Never?” There was something in Sybil's tone that made Ronald look quickly at her. She said the word as though she, too, had something to regret.

”Not in my experience,” answered Surbiton, with the decision of a man past loving or being loved.

”How dreadfully gloomy! One would think you had done with life, Mr.

Surbiton,” said Sybil, laughing.

”Sometimes I think so, Miss Brandon,” answered Ronald in solemn tones.

”I suppose we all think it would be nice to die, sometimes. But then the next morning things look so much brighter.”

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