“You foolish boy!” she said, half-sorrowfully, as she turned to put the belittered room to rights. “It was the dressmaker I sent for, as soon as I got here. I haven’t a rag! You know that! And you know how often you have said that persons in our sort of business ought to dress well.”
The mad wave of doubt that still tumbled him back and forth ebbed suddenly away, as a woman of forty, short and stolid, stepped briskly and quietly out of the inner bedroom. She bowed a businesslike good night to them as she passed out into the hallway, carrying a handbag.
“And this is the way you welcome me back!” reproved Frances, as she drew away from him and fell to studying his face once more. “Well, we can at least talk business,” she added bitterly, on the heels of his awkward silence. “And that, I know, will appeal to you!”
Durkin bowed to the stroke, and even made belated and disjointed efforts of appeasement. But the petals seemed to have fallen from the shaken flower; a teasing sense of her aloofness from him oppressed his mind. In fact, it had always been in the full hue and cry of their adventures with the grim powers of the law that she had seemed nearest to him.
The thought came to him, with a quick sense of terror, of how he might suffer at a time or in a situation not so ridiculously transparent as the present. If, indeed, she ever did give him actual cause for jealousy, how it would rend and tear those roots which had pierced so much deeper than he had ever dreamed! And for a passing moment he felt almost afraid of himself.
CHAPTER XVI
“Then it wasn’t so difficult, after all?” commented Durkin, as Frances ended a description of her three days in Leeksville.
“No, it wasn’t the trouble so much—only, for the first time in my life, I felt so—so cruelly alone!” She found it hard to explain it to him adequately. She wondered why it was she should always shrink from undraping any inner corner of her soul to him, why, at times, she should stand so reluctant to win any of the more intimate touches of comradeship from him.
“That’s the drawback,” he remarked, wide of her mood and thought, “that’s the drawback in doing this sort of thing by oneself!”
“We really ought to hunt in pairs, don’t you think, like timber wolves?”