"What a pair of faces! One would think it were the eve of Dick's
execution, and you were the hangman measuring him for the noose."
"Dick," said Austin, "is leaving us to-night--possibly for many years."
"I don't see that he is so very greatly to be pitied," said Viviette,
trying in vain to meet Dick's eyes. She drew him a pace or two aside.
"Did you read my note--or did you tear it up like the other one?"
"I read it," he said, looking askance at the floor.
"Then why are you so woe-begone?"
He replied in a helpless way that he was not woe-begone. Viviette was
puzzled, hurt, somewhat humiliated. She had made woman's great surrender
which is usually followed by a flourish of trumpets very gratifying to
hear. In fact, to most women the surrender is worth the flourish. But
the recognition of this surrender appeared to find its celebration in a
funeral march with muffled drums. A condemned man being fitted for the
noose, as she had suggested, a mute conscientiously mourning at his own
funeral, a man who had lost a stately demesne in Paradise and had been
ironically compensated by the gift of a bit of foreshore of the Styx
could not have worn a less joyous expression than he on whom she had
conferred the boon of his heart's desire.
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