A Young Man's Heart by Cornell Woolrich

no sign, not even a wave of the hand; she stood motionless beside the wall. They turned a corner and she was gone. “Forever,” the world in all its wisdom seemed to say. But he replied, “I know better. I know better.”

 
     
     
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
    His Bride
     
    1
     
    When he opened his eyes the morning after their arrival, Eleanor was standing at the window looking out. She was holding the coarse net curtains apart to obtain a better view, and her extended arms gleamed whitely with the play of the morning sunlight. He raised one shoulder and lay quietly watching her. Her hair, in great disorder, was silver in the light, and the outline of her narrow little body was sketched in silhouette through the ridiculous lilac voile nightdress she had brought from New York. She was more charming than ever. Again, and for the thousandth time, he told himself how glad he was he had married her. She turned her head slightly, and in granting him his first boon of the day, her profile, discovered him to be awake.
    “Blair,” she exclaimed, “it’s beautiful, beautiful. I’m so glad you brought me.”
    He came and stood beside her, and arms interlocked behind their backs, the entire city lay spread before them, not unreal and seen from a great height as it would have been in the North, but just slightly below them, its rooftops on a level with the eye, and in the clear air even the furthest houses stood out distinctly, each with its tiny window-openings, balconies and roof-tiles all microscopically complete, as on a doll-house held in the palm of one’s hand. And even beyond those, a ribbon of green haze that lay coiled around the city’s outermost limits told where the suburbs and the open country began, fading to a milky blue miles away where the slow climb of the uplands set in, and just above that emerging again to full color-strength in the silver and purple masses of Our Lady of the Snows and its sister peaks, as sharply defined as though cut out with scissors.
    Eleanor drew in her breath, as though she received a physical sensation from it.
    “It’s a dream,” she remarked.
    He remembered hearing her say the same thing about a new dress she had once admired, and about the engagement ring he had bought her. It seemed to him incongruous to class, at a word, this glimpse of terrestrial paradise with a few yards of fluff or a platinum thread.
    A knock on the door drew their attention back within the room. A waiter entered with their chocolate on a tray. Eleanor screamed gently and slipped behind a screen. “How terrible they are here,” she remarked from in back of it, with complacency enough.
    “You were never taught how to enter a room?” Blair shouted at the man. “Your time is so valuable you have not a minute to lose? Put that down and get out.”
    The waiter stammered an apology and withdrew, cringing backwards as though in the presence of infuriated royalty.
    Eleanor stepped out of her retreat with a little laugh. “How quaint they are.”
    “Not too quaint,” Blair growled.
    “Now that the horse is stolen,” she said gayly, struggling into a wrapper, “I’ll lock the stable.”
    And now, seated facing one another across a knee-high onyx tabouret, their faces alight and golden in the sunlight reflected upward by the tiled floor, their knees touching, their feet flexed back on tiptoe under the seats of their chairs, they had reached a quintessence of happiness. A content so deep that it compelled them to toy with trivial things: with the chocolate cups, with the breaking-off and garnishing of tiny fragments of sweet roll with which to feed one another, he with twirling the tassel-cord of his robe, she with pumping her heels in and out of the embroidered mules she wore. The aroma of the chocolate, the touch of l’Origan she bore cached behind the lobe of each ear, the unraveled lace that slowly escaped from Blair’s cigarette, were all like incense to the little gods of felicity, exacting so