"Rinehart, Mary Roberts - The Amazing Interlude" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rinehart Mary Roberts)

Then he stopped. Sometimes the wonder of Sara Lee got him in the throat.
She had so much the look of being poised for flight. Even in her
quietest moments there was that about her - a sort of repressed
eagerness, a look of seeing things far away. Aunt Harriet said that
there were times when she had a "flighty" look.

And that night it was that impression of elusiveness that stopped
Harvey's amiable prattle about the weather and took him to her with his
arms out.

"Sara Lee!" he said. "Don't look like that!"

"Like what?" said Sara Lee prosaically.

"I don't know," he muttered. "You - sometimes you look as though -"
Then he put his arms round her. "I love you," he said. "I'll be good
to you, Sara Lee, if you'll have me." He bent down and put his cheek
against hers. "If you'll only marry me, dear."

A woman has a way of thinking most clearly and lucidly when the man has
stopped thinking. With his arms about her Harvey could only feel. He
was trembling. As for Sara Lee, instantly two pictures f1ashed through
her mind, each distinct, each clear, almost photographic. One was of
Anna, in her tiny house down the street, dragged with a nursing baby.
The other was that one from a magazine of a boy dying on a battlefield
and crying "Mother!"

Two sorts of maternity - one quiet, peaceful, not always beautiful,
but the thing by which and to which she had been reared; the other
vicarious, of all the world.

"Don't you love me - that way?" he said, his cheek still against hers.

"I don't know."

"You don't know!"

It was then that he straightened away from her and looked without seeing
at the blur of light which was the phonograph. Sara Lee, glancing up,
saw him then as he was in the photograph, face set and head thrust
forward, and that clean-cut drive of jaw and backward flow of heavy hair
that marked him all man, and virile man.

She slipped her hand into his.

"I do love you, Harvey," she said, and went into his arms with the
complete surrender of a child.

He was outrageously happy. He sat on the arm of Uncle James' chair where
she was almost swallowed up, and with his face against hers he made his