It had been a successful interview. She had gained all that she dared hope for. Seated in the warm car going home, and shivering as from an ague, she told herself that she had silenced forever all opposition to her wishes. Yet it did not seem a victory. Words which Paul had said lingered in her mind, stinging her with their contempt, the fact that even he could set himself above her. "A crime!" She had never considered it in that light. Surely it was impossible on the face of it that she, Elizabeth Van Vorst, could commit a crime.... And then again—what was it he had said? "Poor fellow, I am sorry for him, if ever he finds out how you have deceived him."
"But he never shall," she said to herself, resolutely as before. "Crime or no crime, his love is worth it. He never shall find out."
Chapter XXVIII
Elizabeth had little time in those days for thought. There was still less time, even, when she was alone with Gerard. The days passed in a whirl of gaiety, in which she had been swallowed up since her return to town. It was a state of things which bored Gerard extremely, but secure in the promise he had at last obtained from her that the wedding should be at the end of January he possessed his soul in such patience as he could muster. And when he requested as a special favor, that she would refuse all invitations for the thirty-first of December and see the Old Year out in peace, she consented at once, and the hope of a quiet evening buoyed him up through other weary ones, when he would lean in his old fashion against the wall, and watch her across a ball-room, the center of an admiring court. Yet, even as he did so, the proud consciousness of proprietorship swelled his heart. She was his—his! He had no longer any doubt of her, or jealousy of the men who talked to her.
Why then was the expected evening, when it came, fraught with an intangible sense of gloom, of oppression, which made the time pass heavily? The old Dutch clock, which the Misses Van Vorst had brought with them from the country seemed to-night to mark the hours with extraordinary slowness, as if the Old Year were in no hurry to be gone, even though the noises in the street, the blowing of horns and of whistles were enough, one might have thought, to hasten his departure.
Elizabeth was pacing restlessly up and down the room. Her hands were clasped carelessly before her, her long house-dress of white cashmere, belted in by a gold girdle, fell about her in graceful folds. There was a flush in her cheeks, a somewhat feverish light in her eyes; she started nervously now and then as some enterprising small boy blew an especially shrill blast on his horn.
"I don't know why it is," she said at last with a petulant little laugh, coming back to her seat by the fire opposite Gerard, and taking up a piece of work, in which she absently set a few stitches, "New Year's Eve always gets on my nerves, I think of all my sins—and that's very unpleasant!" She broke off, pouting childishly, as if in disgust at the intrusion of unwelcome ideas.