“You forgot that,” she said joyously, from the pillow of his shoulder. “You forgot about that in the chapel!”
They drifted down through what seemed a shadowy and far-away city, threading their course past phantasmal carriages and spectral crowds engrossed in their foolish little ghost-like businesses of buying and selling, of coming and going.
“You’re all I’ve got now,” she murmured again, with irrelevant dolefulness.
Her head still rested on the hollow of his shoulder. His only answer was to draw the warmth and clinging weight of her body closer to him.
“And you’ll have to die some day!” she wailed in sudden misery. And though he laughingly protested that she was screwing him down a little too early in the game, she reached up with her ineffectual arms and flung them passionately about him, much as she had done before, as though such momentary guardianship might shield him from both life and death itself, for all time to come.
CHAPTER XXX
Frances sent Durkin on alone to the Chelsea, where, he had finally agreed, they were to take rooms for a week at least. There, she argued, they could live frugally, and there they could escape from the old atmosphere, from the old memories and associations that hour by hour had seemed to grow more unlovely in her eyes.
On wisely reckless second thought, she ran into a florist’s and bought an armful of roses. These she thrust up into the taxi-seat beside him, explaining that he was to scatter them about their rooms, so that he could be in the midst of them when she came. Then she stood at the curb, watching him drive off, demanding of herself whether, after all, some Indian Summer of happiness were not due to her, wondering whether she were still asking too much of life.
Then she climbed the stairs to the little top-floor apartment, saying to herself, compensatingly, that it would be for the last time. She felt glad to think that she had taken from Durkin’s hands the burden of packing and shutting up the desolate and dark-memoried little place.
Yet it had taken her longer than she imagined, and she was still stooping, with oddly mixed emotions, over the crumpled nurse’s dress and the little hypodermic that she carried away from the Van Schaick house, when she heard a hurried footfall on the stairs and the click of a pass-key in the lock. She realized, with a start, that it was Durkin come back for her, even after she had begged him not to.