"I hope he won't come back."
The suggestion set her heart to aching with loneliness. "I have no shame and no pride," she said to herself. "What a contemptible creature a woman is!" But these sneers availed her nothing. As she sat at table—dinner and supper—his vacant place gave her a sense of bereavement not unlike death itself.
Another night of wakefulness and of the subtle and varied torments known only to those blessed and cursed with vivid imagination. What if he should not come back! That was the final and crudest twist of the rack. Next day, it was all day long as if the silence and darkness of the night were still suffocating her. The house, the grounds seemed a desolation of despair. What if he should not come back! A drizzling rain fell, and she sat miserably by the window, unable to sew, unable to read. And at the first sound from the piano—the melancholy notes her fingers instinctively struck—she sprang away as if a hateful ghost had breathed on her. It was only Wednesday; he would not be home until the next day—probably not until Friday—perhaps not then.
She put fresh flowers in vases in all the rooms every day. That day she filled the vases in his sitting room with the best. And she lingered among his belongings, that promised his return. In the drawers, his fine tasteful shirts and ties; in the closets, those attractive suits, silk lined, agreeable to the touch, varied and always tasteful in pattern. She went back to his books—to the poetry, of which he was particularly fond. The volumes fell open naturally at poems that glorified the lofty, the spiritual side of love. Then, like a scorpion, scuttled across the page of Browning's "Last Ride" what Winchie had said—"He looks at you like papa does." She shuddered, was all dread and foreboding again. Was there no such thing in man as love for woman, but only its coarse and lying counterfeit?
She heard an outside door open noisily. She darted along the hall and down to the angle of the stairway, to the landing from which the drive-front entrance could be seen. She leaned over the balustrade, looked. She drew back, stopping the glad cry that rose to her lips; for it was Basil. With features composed she leaned forward again. His soft hat and his rain coat were dripping; evidently, in his eagerness to arrive, he had crossed the lake in an open boat, instead of coming round by the road in a closed carriage. He was gazing toward the sitting-room door with an expression that thrilled her—and at the same time gave her the courage to treat him as her self-respect and her ideas of decency in a man dictated.
"Back already?" said she in a pleasant, indifferent tone.
He turned, looked up at her, his face alight. "How are you?" he cried. "It seems an age."
"We didn't expect you for several days yet," she went on, descending. When she reached the hall, he was waiting with extended hand. "It is good to be here again!" said he. "It was worth going, for the pleasure of getting back."
She shook hands, smiled friendlily, continued on her way to the sitting room. He hesitated, an uneasy look in his eyes that did not escape her. He put his hat and coat on the rack, followed her. "I am glad to be back!" said he.
She laughed, friendlily enough, but her baffling manner only increased his uneasiness. "We're glad to have you," was her polite reply. "If you want to go to your room before supper, you'd better hurry."