There was nothing in her words, her tone, to colour this bare statement of a simple fact. Only a second later, as if in a sudden need of confidence, a resumption of her old childish habit towards him, she raised her eyes to his, and in their clear, gray depths, before they drooped again beneath the long lashes, he read her secret. No words could have told him more plainly that she loved Lightmark--that Dick had merely to speak. Their silence only lasted a moment; but it seemed to Rainham, who had not shifted his position or moved a muscle, that it stretched over an interminable space of time. It was curiously intangible, and yet even then he realized that it would remain with its least accessories in his mind one of those trivial, indelible photographs which last a lifetime. The smell of mignonette that spread in from the window-box through the turquoise-blue Venetian blinds; the chattering of the love-birds; the strains of a waltz of Waldteufel's floating up from a German band in the street below--they ran into a single sensation that was like the stab of cold steel. He sat staring blankly at the tattered bookshelves, playing mechanically with his teaspoon; and presently he became aware that the young girl was talking, was telling him the route they should take next week, and the name of the hotel they were going to at Basel. "Yes," he hazarded, and "Yes," and "Yes," his smiling lips belying the lassitude of his eyes. Actually, he looked out and beyond her, at another Eve, to whom he now paid his adieux. It was the dainty little figure of her childish self which he saw, with its bright, long hair, and its confiding eyes, and its caressing little ways, in the deepening shadows between the bookshelves--and for the last time. It vanished like a shadow, smiling mockingly, and he knew it would never return. In its place abode henceforth the image of this stately maiden, comely and desirable, with the profound eyes which lighted up--for Dick. An unaccountable sense of failure stole over Rainham--unaccountable because he could lay his finger upon no tangible cause of his discomfiture. CHAPTER XI