Then, as his mind grew clearer, and he came to recognize her once more, her earlier sense of loneliness and half-helpless isolation crept away from her. She even grew to take a secret pleasure in giving him his medicine and milk and tablets, in dressing his wound, day by day, in making his pillow more comfortable, in sending the colored hall-boy out after fruit and flowers for him, and in all those duties which broke down the last paling of reserve between them.
And it was a new and unlooked for phase of Frances Candler that Durkin slowly grew to comprehend. The constraint and the quietness of everything seemed to have something akin to a spiritualizing effect on each of them, and it was not long before he waited for her coming and going with a sort of childish wistfulness. Her tenderness of speech and touch and look, her brooding thoughtfulness as she sat beside him, seemed to draw them together more closely than even their old-time most perilous moments had done.
“We’re going to be decent now, aren’t we, Frank?” he said, quietly and joyously one morning.
But there were times when his weakness and stagnation of life and thought gave rise to acute suffering in both of them, times when his imprisonment and his feebleness chafed and galled him. It was agony for her to see him in passionate outbursts, to be forced to stand helplessly by and behold him unmanned and weeping, sometimes when his nervous irritability was at its worst, wantonly and recklessly blaspheming at his fate.
This sinfulness of the flesh she set down to the pain which his arm might be giving him and the unrest which came of many days in bed. As he grew stronger, she told herself, he would be his old, generous-minded and manly self once more.
But Durkin gained strength very slowly. A rent-day came around, and rather than remind him of it Frances slipped out, on a rainy afternoon, and pawned her rings to get money for the payment.
It was as she was creeping shamefaced out of the pawnshop that she looked up and caught sight of a passing automobile. It was a flashing sports-model with a lemon-colored body, and in it, beside a woman with lemon-colored hair, sat MacNutt, gloved, silk-hatted and happy-looking.
At first she beheld the two with an indeterminate feeling of relief. Then a hot wave of resentment swept over her, as she watched them drive away through the fine mist. A consuming sense of the injustice of it all took possession of her, as her thoughts went back to the day of the theft, and she remembered what a little and passing thing Durkin’s money would be to MacNutt, the spender, the prodigal liver, while to her and to Durkin it had meant so much! She knew, too, that he would soon be asking about it; and this brought a new misery into her life.
It was, indeed, only a day or two later that he said to her:
“Do you know, I’m glad we didn’t take that girl’s money—the Van Schaick girl, I mean. It was all our own from the first!”