CHAPTER XX
THE PLAN
Annesley sat as Knight had left her for a long time—minutes, perhaps, or hours. But at last she was very tired and very cold, so tired that she threw herself weakly on the bed, in her dressing-gown, because she couldn't sit up. All through the rest of the dark hours she lay shivering, and did not even trouble to roll herself in the warm down coverlet spread lightly over the bed.
It seemed right, somehow, that she should be cold and miserable physically. She did not care or wish to be comfortable.
Over and over again she asked herself: "What shall I do? What is to become of me—of both of us?" She tried to pray, but her heart was too hard toward the man who had trampled on her life and love for his own cruel purposes. It seemed to her that God would not hear a prayer sent up in such a mood; yet she did not want to soften her heart toward the sinner.
Because it had been so full of forgiveness before he poisoned the chalice with the bitter stream of confession, it was the more impossible to forgive now. It even seemed to Annesley that it would be monstrous to forgive, in the ordinary, human sense of the word, a man who was a living lie.
If there were room for thanksgiving in her wretchedness, it lay in the fact that her love had died a swift and sudden death. Had she gone on loving in spite of all, such love, she thought, must have brought death into her soul.
She did not know how to name her husband now. Even in thinking of him she would not call him "Knight."
What a mockery the name had been! How he must have laughed to know that she was fool enough to believe him a knight of chivalry, who had come like St. George to rescue her from the dragon!
She knew at last that the name he had not wished her to see in the parish register was Michael Donaldson. That meant, she supposed, that her name was Donaldson, too; a name he had dragged through the mire.