On Friday she came up to New York late in the afternoon, and in the evening went to the opera—for a last look round. As the lights were lowering for the rise of the curtain on the second act, Leonora and her husband entered the box. She had forgotten inviting them. She gave Leonora the chair in front and took the one behind—Millicent Rowland, whom she herself brought, had the other front seat. As her chair was midway between the two, she was seeing across Leonora's shoulders. Presently Dumont came in and took the chair behind Leonora's and leaned forward, his chin almost touching the slope of her neck as he talked to her in an undertone, she greatly amused or pretending to be.
The light from the stage fell across Leonora's bosom, fell upon a magnificent string of graduated pearls clasped with a huge solitaire beyond question the string the jeweler's clerk had blunderingly shown her. And there was Dumont's heavy, coarse profile outlined against Leonora's cheek and throat, her cynical, sensuous profile showing just beyond.
Open sprang a hundred doors of memory; into Pauline's mind was discharged avalanche after avalanche of dreadful thoughts. "No! No!" she protested. "How infamous to think such things of my best friend!" But she tried in vain to thrust suspicions, accusations, proofs, back into the closets. Instead, she sank under the flood of them—sick and certain.
When the lights went up she said: "I'm feeling badly all at once. I'm afraid I'll have to take you home, Milly."
"Are you ill, dear?" asked Leonora.
"Oh, no—just faint," she replied, in a voice which she succeeded in making fairly natural.
"Please don't move. Stay on—you really must."
The other man—Shenstone—helped her and Millicent with their wraps and accompanied them to their carriage. When she had set Millicent down she drew a long breath of relief. For the first time in seven years her course lay straight before her. "I must be free!" she said. "I must be ENTIRELY free—free before the whole world—I and my boy."
The next morning, in the midst of her preparations to take the ten-o'clock limited for the West, her maid brought a note to her—a copy of a National Woolens Company circular to the trade, setting forth that "owing to a gratifying easing in the prices for raw wool, the Company are able to announce and take great pleasure in announcing a ten per cent. reduction." On the margin Dumont had scrawled "To go out to-morrow and to be followed in ten days by fifteen per cent. more. Couldn't resist your appeal." Thus by the sheer luck that had so often supplemented his skill and mitigated his mistakes, he had yielded to her plea just in time to confuse the issue between her and him.
She read the circular and the scrawl with a sinking heart. "Nevertheless, I shall go!" she tried to protest. "True, he won't send out this circular if I do. But what does it matter, one infamy more or less in him? Besides, he will accomplish his purpose in some other way of which I shall not know." But this was only the beginning of the battle. Punishment on punishment for an act which seemed right at the time had made her morbid, distrustful of herself. And she could not conquer the dread lest her longing to be free was blinding her, was luring her on to fresh calamities, involving all whom she cared for, all who cared for her. Whichever way she looked she could see only a choice between wrongs. To stay under the same roof with him or at Dawn Hill—self-respect put that out of the question. To free herself—how could she, when it meant sacrificing her parents and also the thousands shivering under the extortions of his monopoly?