In fact, her mood changed even as he looked down at her, troubled by the shadow of utter weariness that rested on her colorless face.
"What would we do, Jim," she asked, after a second long and unbroken silence, "what would we do if this thing ever brought us face to face with MacNutt again?"
"But why should we cross that bridge before we come to it?" was Durkin's answer.
She seemed unable, however, to bar back from her mind some disturbing and unwelcome vision of that meeting. She felt, in a way, that she possessed one faculty which the rapid and impetuous nature of her husband could not claim. It was almost a weakness in him, she told herself, the subsidiary indiscretion of a fecund and grimly resourceful mind. Like a river in flood, it had its strange and incongruous back currents, born of its very oneness of too hurrying purpose. It considered too deeply the imminent and not the remoter and seemingly more trivial contingency.
"But can't you see, Jim, that the further we follow this up the closer and closer it's bringing us to MacNutt?"
"MacNutt is ancient history to us now! We're over and done with him, for all time!"
"You are wrong there, Jim. You misjudge the situation, and you misjudge the man. That is one fact we have to face, one hard fact; MacNutt is not over and done with us!"
"But haven't you made a sort of myth of him? Isn't he only a fable to us now? And haven't we got real facts to face?"
"Ah," she said protestingly, "there is just the trouble. You always refuse to look this fact in the face!"
"Well, what are the facts?" he asked conciliatingly, coercing his attention, and demanding of himself what allowance he must make for that morbid perversion of view which came of a too fatigued body and mind.