“You are going back to Fraternia?” he asked coldly, his tone striking Keith with chill surprise. The latter assented as a matter of course.
There was a moment of silence; Keith felt something sinister in the nature of it.
“Why should you go back there?” Gregory asked now, with the same careless coldness; “you have no heart in Fraternia or its purposes.”
Keith was stirred, and answered pointedly:—
“I have at least a wife in Fraternia, Mr. Gregory.”
Gregory looked at him a moment with a measuring glance, noting his wasted and feeble appearance.
“I suppose you do need nursing,” he said slowly.
Keith Burgess turned ashy pale. Was this wanton injury? Did Gregory wish to insult him? What did it mean? Gregory did not know himself. He knew only that, in the agony of that night, for he had fully resolved himself to see Anna no more, the sight of Keith Burgess worked like madness in his brain.
“Mrs. Burgess,” he said now, with the deliberation of strongly suppressed excitement, “is more highly endowed for great issues than any person I have ever known. It is almost a pity that she should not have freedom to use her powers in the greater activities to which she is fitted.”
Each sentence, cruel with all the cruelty which the climax of pride and passion could inspire, pierced the heart of Keith like a shaft barbed with steel. He stepped backward and leaned against a tree, breathing hard. The occult, mysterious quality of the moment’s experience to him was that he saw himself, distinctly and as if by an inexorable necessity, turning away from Fraternia, and going back by the way which he had come.