Second String by Antonio Hope

A stolen kiss may mean very different things -- almost nothing (not quite nothing, or why steal it?), something yet not too much, or well-nigh everything. The two parties need not give it the same value; a witness of it is not, of necessity, bound by the valuation of either of them. It may be merely a jest, of such taste as charity can allow in the circumstances; it may be the crown and end of a slight and passing flirtation; it may be the first visible mark of a passion destined to grow to fierce intensity. Or it may seem utterly evasive in its significance at the moment, as it were indecipherable and imponderable, waiting to receive from the future its meaning and its weight.

The last man to find his way through a maze of emotional analysis was Andy Hayes; his mind held no thread of experience whereby to track the path, his temperament no instinct to divine it. He could not assign a value -- or values -- to the incident of which chance had made him a witness; what Harry's impulse, Isobel's obvious acceptance of it, the intensity and absorption that marked the bearing of the two in the brief moment in which he saw them as he lifted Vivien's shawl, stood looking for a flash of time, and quickly turned away -- what these things meant or amounted to he could not tell. But there was no uncertainty about his feelings; he was filled with deep distaste. He was not a man of impracticable ideals -- his mind walked always in the mean -- but he was naturally averse from intrigue, from underhand doings, from the playing of double parts. They were traitors in this thing; let it mean the least it could, even to mere levity or unbecoming jocularity (their faces rose in his mind to contradict this view even as he put it), still they were so far traitors. The first brunt of his censure fell on Isobel, but his allegiance to Harry was also so sorely shaken that it seemed as though it could never be the same again. The engagement had been to Andy a sacrosanct thing; it was now sacrilegiously defaced by the hands of the two most bound to guard it. "Very low-down!" was Andy's humble phrase of condemnation -- at least very low-down; how much more he knew not but that in the best view of the case. At the moment his heart had gone out to Vivien in a great pang of compassion; it seemed such a shame to tamper with, even if not actually to betray, a trust like hers. His face, like Isobel's, had been red -- but red with anger -- under the cover of the night. He was echoing the Nun's "Poor girl!" which in loyalty to his friend he had before resented.