“Your hope is vain, Grierson. The thing is done. The sword is suspended over my head. I am now speculating on the possibility of certain gentlemen cutting the hair that holds it.”
He went back to his desk again with the intention of boring into the inwardness of the situation, but, strangely, his mind showed a disposition to wander. It skipped offishly away from demand notes and speculations regarding Michael Moran; was drawn again and again where Jim did not want it to go—and where it would not be welcome. Of the latter he was sure. For it was Marie Ducharme who obtruded and elbowed aside more serious matters.
Jim moved to the Widow Stickney’s that night. He wondered how Miss Ducharme would regard his coming. Doubtless it would not decrease the ill will she felt toward him. Doubtless she would regard it as an impertinent intrusion. What did it matter how she regarded it? He said that to himself, but somehow he could not quite convince himself that he said it with all sincerity.
CHAPTER VII
The rural individual, riding for the first time on a descending elevator, experiences a sensation that leads to a fixed preference for stairs. It is a peculiar sensation. It may be reproduced in less degree psychologically. For instance, the boy on his way to the woodshed with his father and a razor-strop knows it; the young man about to announce to her father his ambition to become a son-in-law is acquainted with it. It comes to many people as they approach the unknown, the dreaded, the long-sought-after. It is a mingling of excitement, apprehension, anticipation, and the three of them do not mingle in peace. They seem, indeed, to have a most lively and troublesome time of it in the region known as the pit of the stomach.
As Jim left his room to go down to his first breakfast at the Widow Stickney’s table he experienced an unmistakable attack of it. Marie Ducharme was the cause. Doubtless they would breakfast together. He was a bit apprehensive as to how it would go off. There was a certain amount of curiosity-incited anticipation of a second meeting with her, a second opportunity to glimpse her queer, disturbed, turbulent personality. Let there be no error here—Jim Ashe was not drawn toward Marie Ducharme. Quite the contrary. She was not at all the sort of person who would attract him; and her present frame of mind was not such as to magnetize any healthy young man. But she was a girl; she was a step beyond the ordinary; she had a personality that one could not encounter and escape unaffected. That was all.
He hesitated for a moment in the hall, and then entered the dining-room, where the widow and Marie Ducharme were already at the table.
“Right here, Mr. Ashe,” said the widow; “take this here chair with the arms and the cushion into it. It’ll seem sort of queer to see a man settin’ into it agin. My first used it and my second used it.”
“And you keep it in case it might be needed again,” said Jim, gravely.
The widow shook her head. “’Tain’t nothin’ but a memento no more. Husbands is all right, but enough’s enough. What a body can want of more ’n two is more ’n I can see. Let me make you acquainted with Miss Ducharme, Mr. Ashe.”