She could not explain her reason of fear to him. She could not explain it to herself more than that the eyes had seemed to know. What? She could not tell; but they had had a deadly intelligence. She only whispered back, "But he is awful!"
"Oh, I guess not," Harry grinned, and turned his back to the counter, "only part white. Makes him a little sharper at a bargain."
But, in spite of his off-handedness, Flora saw he was alert, touched with excitement. Once or twice he looked from the shopkeeper to the sapphire.
"Do you like it, Flora?" he said. "Do you want it?" He spoke eagerly against her reluctance.
"It is the most beautiful thing I ever saw, but--" She could not put it to him why she shrank from it. That feeling which had touched her at the first had a little expanded, the sense of the sapphire's sinister charm. She faltered out as much as she could explain. "It's too much for me."
His shoulders shook with appreciation of this. "Oh, I guess not! If you keep that up I shall be thinking you mean it is too much for me."
It hadn't been in the least what she meant, but now that he had suggested it to her--"Well, I shouldn't like it to be," she blushed, but she braved him.
The ring of his laughter filled the little, dark, old shop, and made the proprietor blink.
"Oh, I guess not," he said again, and with that he seemed to make an end of her hesitations. There was not another objection she could bring up. She let him draw the ring off her hand with a mingled feeling of reluctance and relief. She saw him turn briskly to the shopkeeper.
"Now, Joe, how much you want?" That much she heard as she turned away with a fear lest it might, and a hope that it would be, too much for him!
She lingered away to the door, through whose upper glazed half she saw the street swarming and sunny, picked out with streamers of red and squares of green. The murmur of traffic outside was faint to her ears. The murmur of the two voices talking on inside the shop momently grew fainter. She looked behind her and saw them now in the back of the shop, close by the grinning brazier.
The light of it showed what would have been otherwise dark. It showed her Harry, straddling, hands in pockets, hat thrust back, a silhouette as hard as if cast in cold metal. The aspect of him, thus, was strange, not quite unlike himself, but giving her the feeling that she had never known how much Harry smoothed over.