“But some one of the clerks going out may have seen that it was bolted. Wouldn’t he have pushed the bolt back? I’m going to see.”
He groped to the door and tugged at the handle. The door, for all the effect his effort had on it, might have been a section of solid wall.
“Come back,” she called.
He felt his way until his foot touched the coat. As he let himself down beside her, his hand brushed over her hair, and unconsciously she leaned toward him. He felt the pressure of her shoulder against his side, and the touch sent a thrill through him. He leaned back against the wall and stared into the blackness with eyes that saw only visions of the happiness that might have been.
“We mustn’t make any effort to break out,” she said. “It is useless. And every time we move about and tug at the door, it makes us breathe that much faster.”
“Yes,” he sighed, “I suppose we can only sit here and wait.”
“Do you know,” she said softly, “I am wondering why our situation does not seem more terrible to me. It should, shouldn’t it?”
“I hardly think so,” he replied.
“The relative importance of our worldly affairs,” she went on dreamily, “appears to change when one sees that they are all to stop at once. They recede into the background of the mind. What counts then is, oh, I don’t want to think of it! My father—he——” Her shoulders shook for a moment under the stress of sudden grief, but she quickly regained her control. “There, now,” she whispered, “I won’t do that.”
For a time they sat in silence. His own whirling thoughts were of a sort that he could not fathom; they possessed him completely, they destroyed, seemingly, all power of analysis, they made him dumb; and they were tangled inextricably in the blended impressions of possession and loss.