Her darkest moments were those when she saw that Durkin was fretting over the loss of his ill-gained fortune, burning with his subterranean fires of hatred for MacNutt, and inwardly vowing that he would yet live to have his day.
She was still hoping that time, the healer, would in some way attend to each of his wounds, though that of the spirit, she knew, was the deeper of the two. Yet from day to day she saw that his resentment lay sourly embedded in him, like a bullet; her only hope was that what nature could neither reject nor absorb it would in due time encyst with indifference. So if she herself became a little infected with his spirit of depression, she struggled fiercely against it and showed him only the cheeriest inglenooks of her many-chambered emotions.
“See, it’s almost like spring again!” she cried joyously, as she leaned over his chair and watched the morning sunlight, misty and golden on the city house-tops.
The window-curtains swayed and flapped in the humid breeze; the clatter of feet on the asphalt, the rumble of wheels and the puff and whir of passing automobiles came up to them from the street below.
“It seems good to be alive!” she murmured pensively, as she slipped down on the floor and sat in the muffled sunlight, leaning against his knees. There was neither timidity nor self-consciousness in her attitude, as she sat there companionably, comfortably, with her thoughts far away.
For a long time Durkin looked down at her great tumbled crown of chestnut hair, glinting here and there with its touch of reddish gold. He could see the quiet pulse beating in the curved ivory of her throat.
She grew conscious of his eyes resting on her, in time, and turned her face solemnly up to him. He held it there, with the oval of her chin caught in the hollow of his hand.
“Frank, there’s something I’m going to ask you, for the twentieth time!”
She knew what it was even before he spoke. But she did not stop him, for this new note of quiet tenderness in his voice had taken her by surprise.
“Frank, can’t you—won’t you marry me, now?”