He demanded an answer, and there was no gain-saying him.
“There is no money, Jim!” she said slowly and quietly. And in as few words as she could she told him of the theft.
It was pitiable, to her, to see him, already weak and broken as he was, under the crushing weight of this new defeat. She had hoped to save him from it, for a few more days at least. But now he knew; and he reviled MacNutt passionately and profanely, and declared that he would yet get even, and moaned that it was the end of everything, and that all their fine talk and all their plans had been knocked in the head forever, and that now they would have to crawl and slink through life living by their wits again, cheating and gambling and stealing when and where they could.
All this Frances feared and dreaded and expected; but desperately and forlornly she tried to buoy up his shattered spirits and bring back to him some hope for the future.
She told him that he could work, that they could live more humbly, as they had once done years before, when she had taught little children music and French, and he was a telegraph agent up at the lonely little Canadian junction-station of Komoka, with a boarding-house on one side of him and a mile of gravel-pit on the other.
“And if I have you, Jim, what more do I want in life?” she cried out, as she turned and left him, that he might not see the misery and the hopelessness on her own face.
“Oh, why didn’t you let me kill him!” he called out passionately after her. But she did not turn back, for she hated to see him unmanned and weeping like a woman.
CHAPTER XXVIII
“Surely this is Indian Summer—strayed or stolen!” said Frank one morning a few days later, as she wheeled Durkin and his big arm-chair into the sunlight by the open window.
His arm was healing slowly, and his strength was equally slow in coming back to him. Yet she was not altogether unhappy during those fleeting days of work and anxiety.