Sore encumbered as he was, she proved too quick for him. In an instant she had jerked open the door and flung herself into the fog. Some heavy vehicle was lumbering past at the moment. A scream like the cry of a rusty axle broke from among its wheels. The cab rolled on, its driver unnoticing, or diplomatic, perhaps, over an accident which he connected, if at all, with other than his fare. Paralysed for an instant, the next, Mark had softly closed the swinging door.
“There’s no help for it,” he thought, momentarily death-white. “I must go on and play the game.”
He played it, for all that rebuff, so convincingly, that the issue left him full twenty years’ triumphant enjoyment of its fruits.
That same night his wife woke for the first time to her full reason, and looked intently into his eyes.
“Am I to be allowed to see it?” she said.
He bowed his head distressfully.
“By my full will, if not the will of a Greater,” he murmured.
“It is dead?”
He rose, and went and brought, and placing the little forlorn shape in her arms, left her with it a while. When he returned, it was put aside gently but indifferently.
“Bury my poor past,” she said. “It reproaches me with an altered face. Yet I can’t help myself—I think I never could. You wouldn’t wish it, you know; and what you wish or don’t wish comes to happen or to fail.”