“Justin!” she implored him.
“Will you go away, please?”
She resisted, roused at last, eloquent at last, fighting desperately—
“Justin! I must tell you——Justin! Wait! Listen! Just a minute——Justin!”
But he took her lightly by the arm, and in a moment she was in the passage, and he had shut the door against her.
She went shaking and stumbling down the staircase and out into the sunshine.
CHAPTER XXX
It seems to be a fact that love, like the camel, can live on its own resources for a length of time that amazes the less fantastic and incalculable rest of creation; but it is equally certain and a great deal more comprehensible that months of strain, followed by a spell of hot weather, salad and strawberries, nervous excitement, sleepless nights and a climax of elemental emotion, have sooner or later to be paid for; that, soothing as it may be to the soul to lie for three hours in a damp ditch without changing afterwards, it is distinctly bad for the body; and finally, that only a lover or a camel (there is certainly a likeness between them in more ways than one) could be surprised if at last even their strength goes from them, and they give their relations or their driver a deal of unnecessary trouble.
Laura, developing, for no reason that Aunt Adela could conceive, a feverish cold, dragged about the house for a week, refusing to go beyond the garden, saying how much better she would be in a day or two, and then collapsed. Once in bed she found herself suddenly too weak and ill to struggle with the kindly, overbearing Samsons who kept her there, and by the end of the day the very knowledge of them had passed, swamped, with the memory of the past and the fear of the future, in the present mercy of bodily pain.