“But, good heaven, think of the risk!” he still half-heartedly pleaded. “It’s dangerous, now!”
“My beloved own,” she said, with her habitual slow little head shake, and with a quietness of tone that carried a tacit reproof with it, “life has far worse dangers than the Ralston!”
She had felt unconditionally, completely drawn toward him a moment before, while still warm with her unuttered gratitude. As she thought of the indignity and the danger from which he had carried her she had almost burned with the passion for some fit compensation, without any consideration of self. Now, in her weariness of body and nerve, he had unconsciously unmasked her own potential weakness to herself, and she felt repelled from him, besieged and menaced by him, the kindest and yet the most cruel of all her enemies.
CHAPTER XX
As she slowly wakened in response to the call that had been left at the hotel office, Frances wondered, with the irrelevancy of the mental machinery’s first slow movements, if Durkin, at that precise moment, was still sleeping in his own bed and room in his own distant part of the city. For his awakening, she felt, would be sure to be a gray and disheartening one. It would be then, and then only, that the true meaning of their defeat would come home to him. She wondered, too, if he was looking to her, waiting for her to help him face the old-time, dreaded monotony of inactive and purposeless life.
“Oh, poor Jim!” she murmured again, under her breath.
She hoped, as she waked more fully to her world of realities, that he at least was still sleeping, that he at any rate was securing his essential rest of nerve and body,—for some heavy dregs of her own utter weariness of the previous night still weighed down her spirits and ached in her limbs.
She had always boasted that she could sleep like a child. “I make a rampart of my two pillows, and no worries ever get over it!” Yet she now felt, as she waited for a lingering last minute or two in her warm bed, that, if fortune allowed it, she could lie there forever, and still be unsatisfied, and cry for one hour more.
But she had already made her rigorous plans for the day, and time, she knew, was precious. After her bath she at once ordered up an ample breakfast of fruit and eggs and coffee and devilled mutton chops—remembering, as she religiously devoured her meat, that Durkin had always declared she was carnivorous, protesting that he could tell it by those solid, white, English teeth of hers.
Then she dressed herself simply, in a white shirt-waist and a black broadcloth skirt, with a black-feathered turban-hat draped with a heavy traveling veil. This simple toilet, however, she made with infinite care, pausing only long enough to tell herself that today, as never before, appearances were to count with her. Yet beyond this she brushed every thought away from her. She kept determinedly preoccupied, moving feverishly about the room, allowing space for no meditative interludes, permitting herself never to think of the day and what it was to hold for her.