Leave Her to Heaven by Ben Ames Williams Page B

door, she wished to knock at every one, imagining him secret and alone, wishing to share his solitude. When, surrendering, she returned at last to her compartment and to bed, she lay long awake, crushed under a weight of loneliness because he was lost to her forever.
    But in the morning they left the train and Glen Robie was on the platform, and after the first greeting he asked Mrs. Berent: ‘Did you see Mr. Harland?’
    â€˜Harland?’ she echoed. ‘Who’s he?’
    â€˜Richard Harland,’ he said. ‘He’s the man who wrote that new book, Time Without Wings. He’s coming to the ... Oh, here he is now!’
    Ellen, half-guessing the truth, turned to look where Robie pointed; and she saw Lin and a tall young man coming toward them and felt as though a firm hand had gripped her heart. Her senses clouded dizzily, and when presently she was seated beside Harland in the touring car, her shoulder against his, she pressed her hands to her cheeks, thinking they must feel hot to her palms! All the surface of her body everywhere was tingling deliciously and frighteningly too. She was glad that Robie talked as he drove, so that she need not speak for a while. Her voice, she feared, might betray her, and when at last she dared turn to Harland with some careful, laughing word, she saw Ruth, sitting on his other side, look at her in wonder at her tone.
    â€“ III –
    The fortnight that followed, at the ranch and then at Robie’s fishing lodge in the mountains, was for Ellen a time of breathless wonder, of longing almost insupportable, of suspense almost too keen to be borne. She was caught in a torrent of emotions so strange and new that she was at first bewildered and overwhelmed; a torrent so strong that she could not resist it.
    At first, instinctively, she sought to avoid Harland and the others too; and she took a horse every morning, disappearing
sometimes for the whole day, returning only at dinnertime. But though she went alone, yet in her thoughts Harland was beside her. There was one day when she rode to a lofty outlook and secured her horse and sat for long hours on a bold rim high above a hidden canyon, basking in the sun, her eyes ranging unseeingly; and in her fancy she welcomed him there to share her solitude, speaking aloud, carrying on with him long conversations that were tinglingly impersonal and polite, rich with unuttered meanings. She lay for a while, her arms tight across her breast, her big hat shading her face against the sun, her eyes closed; and at every near-by sound she seemed to hear his step, imagined him coming ardently to seek her here.
    This complete and absorbed attention to everything a man did or said, this constant hope that Harland would turn to her, coupled with a breathless anticipation that was something like terror, was new in her life. Her devotion to her father had armored her against those hours of tremulous and unadmitted longings which almost any chance-met boy may provoke in a girl still in her teens, rendered intensely sensitive to masculine approaches by forces within herself which she has been taught she must not recognize. Once when Ellen was twelve there had been a senior at Tech who sometimes came home with her father to discuss a thesis upon which he was at work, and who for weeks seemed to her the most completely wonderful person she had ever seen, so that she dreamed of him both awake and asleep and gave him openly a youthful adoration which she was not yet old enough to conceal. But this keen awareness of Harland was at once less frank and more profound; for she had been incapable at that time of those reactions — a quickened pulse, a warm flush on cheeks and throat, a faintness, a soft readiness for surrender — which even the sound of Harland’s voice could provoke in her now.
    Hoping his thoughts might be drawn to her as hers were drawn to him, she wondered whether he knew from Robie their errand here; and she wished