"You should go out for a little while, dearest. Haidee will take care of me."
She had indeed a longing that was almost active pain for air and the sight of sky and green things, and needed little persuasion, seeing that he was really better. She did not even stop to change her frock, which was old and unfashionable, and in her haste caught up an ancient school-hat of Haidee's, trimmed with a shabby bow of silk ribbon, and more than slightly bent out of shape about the brim. She felt it mattered little how she looked, so long as she could escape into the outer air. Her head ached violently.
As she hurried down the front-door steps, a man walking up the street looked at her curiously, and something in her peculiar walk brought a flash of amazement to his eyes and quickened his steps. He was tall and well-dressed, with traces of breeding, and a certain dashing handsomeness about him, but there was a green tint in his ravaged cheeks, and the straight figure under the well-cut coat was gaunt and shrunk. His eyes lacked lustre, and one of them jerked and winked mechanically at irregular intervals. The man was a nervous and physical wreck. As he passed the house from which Val had come, he looked up and noticed its number and the name on the door-plate. A moment later he caught up with the slight, hurrying figure, gave a swift glance at her profile and the shabby hat above it, then, in the quiet drawling tones of the man about town, he said politely:
"How do, Val?"
She swung round with the wild jerk of a lassoed creature and faced him. Then he was not so sure after all that it was Val. The grey-faced woman, with all the life gone out of her eyes, sunken cheeks and blanched lips, was certainly not the Valentine Valdana of other days. The figure, the walk was hers; but the face was the face of some strange woman--some woman in trouble, too, and that was a bore. He was a man who always avoided women in trouble. On the point of lifting his hat, with a slight apology and walking away, her words detained him.
"You!" Her voice was the voice of Valentine Valdana with all the music gone from it: harsh and grinding as stone on stone.
"Yea, verily," said he, and stared sardonically into her fearful eyes. They stood so for a moment staring at each other. Then the man laughed; but it was not a pleasant laugh.
"You don't seem as pleased to see me as you ought to be!"
"You!" she stammered again. It seemed all she was able to say.
"Yes, me, my very dear Val," he repeated with something like a snarl. "Time appears to have dimmed your excellent eyesight, as well as robbed you of your gift of repartee!"