Through a blur of tears, the girl looked down and saw the tiny, sharp-finned creatures darting here and there in a beam of sun like a small search-light set to show them off. She moved her hand on the rail to lean further over, and her soft fingers touched his hand for a moment. She would not draw them away quickly, lest she hurt him; why, she did not know, but she could not--would not--hurt him. Not now! The two hands lay side by side for a full minute, and the touch to Gordon was as if a roseleaf had kissed his soul. He had never felt anything sweeter. He longed to gather the little hand into his clasp and feel its pulses trembling there as he had felt it in the church the night before, but she was not his. He might not touch her till she had her choice of what to do, and she would never choose him, never, when she knew how he had deceived her. That one supreme moment they had of perfect consciousness, consciousness of the drawing of soul to soul, of the sweetness of that hovering touch of hands, of the longing to know and understand each other. Then a sharp whistle sounded, and a farmer’s boy with a new rake and a sack of corn on his shoulder came sauntering briskly down the road to the bridge. Instantly they drew apart, and Celia felt that she had been on the verge of disloyalty to her true self. They walked silently back to the station, each busy with his own thoughts, each conscious of that one moment when the other had come so near. CHAPTER XI There were a lot of people at the station. They had been to a family gathering of some sort from their remarks, and they talked loudly and much, so that the two stood apart--for the seats were all occupied--and had no opportunity for conversation, save a quiet smiling comment now and then upon the chatter about them, or the odd remarks they heard. There had come a constraint upon them, a withdrawing of each into his shell, each conscious of something that separated. Gordon struggled to prevent it, but he seemed helpless. Celia would smile in answer to his quiet remarks, but it was a smile of distance, such as she had worn early in the morning. She had quite found her former standing ground, with its fence of prejudice, and she was repairing the breaks through which she had gone over to the enemy during the day. She was bracing herself with dire reminders, and snatches from those terrible letters which were written in characters of fire in her heart. Never, never, could she care for a man who had done what this man had done. She had forgotten for a little while those terrible things he had said of her dear dead father. How could she have forgotten for an instant! How could she have let her hand lie close to the hand that had defiled itself by writing such things!