“How did we meet!” she echoed. “How does any one meet? In a fog, by accident, after loneliness. Sometimes it’s for better; sometimes it’s for worse. One never knows until the end.” She stood up and drew her wraps about her, snuggling her chin against her furs. “I ought to be going now; your wife must be needing you, Mr. Gurney—— Oh, well, if you want to see me out.”
She dropped to her knees beside Teddy. “Good-by, little champion. Some day you and I will go away together and you must tell me all that you learnt from Harriet about—about our secret.”
When they had vanished through the hole in the floor, Teddy tiptoed over to the trap-door and peered down. With a glance across his shoulder, his father signaled to him not to follow. He ran to the window to get one last glimpse of her, but the fog prevented; all he could see was the moving of two disappearing shadows. He heard the sound of their footsteps growing fainter, and less certain on the gravel.
Left to himself, he pulled from his knickerbockers’ pocket a knotted handkerchief. Undoing it, he counted its contents: Hal’s four shillings and Mrs. Sheerug’s half-a-crown. He smiled seriously. Sitting down on the floor, he spread out the coins to make sure that he hadn’t lost any of them. Six-and-sixpence! To grown people it might not seem wealth; to him it was the beginning of five pounds.
CHAPTER X—THE WIFE OF A GENIUS
But, my old pirate, who is she?
The orderliness of the room had been carried to excess; it suggested the austere orderliness of death. Life is untidy; it has no time for folded hands. The room’s garnished aspect had the chill of unkind preparedness.
From the window a bar of sunlight streamed across a woman lying on a white, unruffled bed. Its brilliance revealed the deep hollows of her eyes; they were like violets springing up in wells of ivory. Her arms, withdrawn from the sheets, stretched straightly by her side; the fingers were bloodless, as if molded from wax. Her head, which was narrow and shapely, lay cushioned on a mass of chestnut hair. She had the purged voluptuousness of one of Rossetti’s women who had turned saint. Her valiant mouth was smiling. Only her eyes and mouth, of all her body, seemed alive. She had spoken with effort. It was as though the bar of gold, which fell across her breast, was pinning her to the bed. Some such thought must have occurred to the man who was standing astraddle and bowed before the fire. He crossed the room and commenced to pull down the blind.