XXXVII
Before the wide-flung window of her attic bedchamber, Sophy Gerard was crouching with her face turned westward. She had abandoned all effort to sleep. The one thought that was beating in her brain was too insistent, too clamorous. Somewhere beyond that tangled mass of chimneys and telegraph-poles, somewhere on the other side of the gray haze which hung about the myriad roofs, John and Louise were working out their destiny, speaking at last the naked truth to each other.
Somehow or other, during those few minutes every thought of herself and her own life seemed to have passed away. John's face seemed always before her—the sudden, hard lines about his mouth; the dull, smoldering pain in his eyes. How would he return? Louise had guarded the secret of her life so well. Would he wrest it from her, or—
She started suddenly back into the room. There was a knocking at the door, something quite different from her landlady's summons. She wrapped her dressing-gown around her, pulled the curtains around the little bed on which she had striven to rest, and moved toward the door. She turned the handle softly.
"Who is that?" she asked.
John almost pushed his way past her. She closed the door with nerveless fingers. Her eyes sought his face, her lips were parted. She clung to the back of the chair.
"You have seen Louise?" she exclaimed breathlessly.
"I have seen Louise," he answered. "It is all over!"
She looked a little helplessly around her. Then she selected the one chair in the tiny apartment that was likely to hold him, and led him to it.