Burned Bridges

"In the meantime, let's talk about selling automobiles, or the weather,

anything but the war," Sophie said suddenly. She pressed a button on the

wall. "We're going to drink tea and forget the war," she continued

almost defiantly. "I won't ask either of you to stay for dinner, because

I'm going out."

Carr's house sat on a slope that dipped down to a long narrow park, and

beyond that to a beach on which slow rollers from the outside broke with

a sound like the snore of a distant giant. Along that slope and away to

the eastward the city was speckled with lights, although it was barely

five o'clock, so early does dark close in in that latitude when the year

is far spent. And when the maid trundled in a tea-wagon, that vista of

twinkling specks, and the more distant flash of Point Atkinson light

intermittently stabbing the murky Gulf, was shut away by drawn blinds,

and the four of them sat in the cosy room eating little cakes and

drinking tea and chatting lightly of things that bulked smaller than the

war.

Presently Sam Carr drew Tommy away to the library to look up some legal

technicality over which they had fallen into dispute. Sophie lay back

in her chair, eyes fixed on the red glow of the embers as if she saw

through them and into vast distances beyond.

And Thompson sat covertly looking at her profile, the dull gold of her

coiled hair, the red-lipped mouth that was made for kisses and

laughter--and he was glad just to look at her, to be near. For he was

beginning to say to himself that it was no good fighting against fate,

that this girl had put some spell on him from which he would never be

wholly free. Nor did he, in that mood, desire to be free. He wanted that

spell to grow so strong that in the end it would weave itself about her

too, make love beget love. There was quickening in him again that desire

to pursue, to conquer, to possess. The ego in him whispered that once

for a moment Sophie had rested like a homing bird in his arms, and

would, again. But he was not to be betrayed by headlong impulse. The

time was not yet. Instinct warned him that in some fashion, vague,

unrevealed, he had still to prove himself to Sophie Carr. He was aware

intuitively that she weighed him in the balance of cold, critical

reason, against any emotional appeal--just as he, himself, was learning

to weigh things and men. He did not know this. He only felt it. But he

felt sure of his instinct where she was concerned.

And so he was content, for the time, with the privilege of being near

her. Some day-Sophie looked at him. For the moment his own gaze had wandered from her

to the fire, his mind yielding tentatively to rose-tinted visions.