Waltz Into Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page A

attribute it to. All the women in
my family have been like that. My mother was married at fifteen, and
my father was at the time well over forty. The mere fact that you
were thirty-six, was what first--" With maidenly seemliness,
she forebore to finish it.
    He
kept devouring her with his eyes, still incredulous.
    "Are
you disappointed ?" she asked timidly.
    "How
can you ask that?" he exclaimed.
    "Am
I forgiven ?" was the next faltering question.
    "It
was a lovely deception," he said with warmth of feeling. "I
don't think there's been a lovelier one ever committed."
    He
smiled, and her smile, still somewhat abashed, answered his own.
    "But
now I will have to get used to you all over again. Grow to know you
all over again. That was a false start," he said cheerfully.
    She
turned her head aside and mutely half-hid it against her own
shoulder. And yet even this gesture, which might have seemed maudlin
or revoltingly saccharine in others, she managed to carry off
successfully, making it appear no more than a playful parody while at
the same time deftly conveying its original intent of rebuked
coyness.
    He
grinned.
    She
turned her face toward him again. "Are your plans, your, er,
intentions, altered?"
    "Are
yours?"
    "I'm
here,"she said with the utmost simplicity, grave now.
    He
studied her a moment longer, absorbing her charm. Then suddenly, with
new-found daring, he came to a decision. "Would it make you feel
better, would it ease your mind of any lingering discomfort," he
blurted out, "if I were to make a confession to you on my own
part?"
    "You
?" she said surprised.
    "I--I
no more told you the entire truth than you told me," he rushed
on.
    "But--but
I see you quite as you said you were, quite as your picture described
you--"
    "It
isn't that, it's something else. I too perhaps felt just as you did,
that I wanted you to like me, to accept my offer, solely on the
strength of the sort of man I was in myself. For myself alone, in
other words."
    "But
I see that, and I do," she said blankly. "I don't
understand."
    "You
will in a moment," he promised her, almost eagerly. "Now I
must confess to you that I'm not a clerk in a coffee-import house."
    Her
face betrayed no sign other than politely interested incomprehension.
    "That
I haven't a thousand dollars put aside, to--to start us off."
    No
sign. No sign of crestf all or of frustrated avarice. He was watching
her intently. A slow smile of indulgence, of absolution granted,
overspread her features before he had spoken next. Well before he
had spoken next. He gave it time.
    "No,
I own a coffee-import house, instead."
    No
sign. Only that slightly forced smile, such as women give in
listening to details of a man's business, when it doesn't interest
them in the slightest but they are trying to be polite.
    "No,
I have closer to a hundred thousand dollars."
    He
waited for her to say something. She didn't. She, on the contrary,
seemed to be waiting for him to continue. As if the subject had been
so arid, and barren of import, to her, that she did not realize the
climax had already been reached.
    "Well,
that's my confession," he said somewhat lamely.
    "Oh,"
she said, as if brought up short. "Oh, was that it? You mean--"
She fluttered her hand with vague helplessness. "--about your
business, and money matters--" She brought two fingers to her
mouth, and crossed it with their tips. Stifling a yawn that, without
the gesture of concealment, he would not have detected in the first
place. "There are two things I have no head for," she
admitted. "One is politics, the other is business, money
matters."
    "But
you do forgive me?" he persisted. Conscious at the same time of
a fierce inward joy, that was almost exultation; as when one has
encountered a perfection of attitude, at long last, and almost by
chance, that was scarcely to be hoped for.
    She
laughed outright this time, with a glint of mischief, as if he were
giving her more credit than was due her. "If you must be
forgiven, you're forgiven," she