XI.
Mr. Ogden, deeply moved, went to his rooms.
She, the cause of it all, sat at the window with a book in her hands without reading it. There was a look in the woman's face that amazed him, a hard, cold look, that he had never seen there before while the sunbeams fell on her bewitching features and on the green leaves still in her hair.
"I want to leave the place at once," she said without looking at him.
"That poor man's face seems to haunt you, dear tender-hearted girlie," he replied with an outburst of tenderness, taking her in his arms and kissing the handsome face he loved so dearly.
It was a fortunate thing that he was blissfully ignorant of her relation to the dead man.
Gathering up courage—seeing that no suspicion had entered his mind—she raised her beautiful eyes to his languidly.
"Yes, you are right, dear, I cannot stand such horrible things ... it shocks me," she answered with her accustomed dissimulation in tone and action.
Although she was a great adept in the art of hypocrisy and dissimulation, she could not altogether hide the uneasiness which had taken possession of her. A strange expression came into her eyes, an expression he had never seen there. He looked at her and was puzzled. What was it? What brought the change about? He could not tell.
She turned suddenly and looked out of the window with a stony face, in order to hide, to subdue,—what? Did she conjure up a sinful vision of her own life? No, she would not give in, but she was startled to perceive something within her she did not reckon with: a voice wanted to be heard, no matter how hard she tried to subdue it. It was the voice of motherhood—that feeling seemed to be not quite dead in the heart of the shameless woman. It was Nature's revenge! She had to listen to the voice of Nature, or was it conscience, slowly awakening to life?