“Oh, but I’ll come back, and go on and on so cheerfully! I give you my word,” she assured him. “I’ll do everything I can for you. Just grant me the hour. It’s not the fraction of a second to you. You say that you never have cared for anyone. Yet you boast of your imagination. Can’t you imagine what it is really to care? Won’t you even try?”
“I might do that.” He eyed her. “I might try.”
All the drive home his manner was detached. He did not repulse her gratitude for his grudging consideration of her request. Neither did he explain that he was trying to imagine what “caring” would be like—but trying through jealousy, its crudest mood.
“I will tell you—well, afterward,” he said, on bidding her “sleep light” within Apollyon Palace.
“After what?”—she.
“That I don’t know myself as yet,” he snapped.
Afterward—if only we could know the afterward before!
She slept light. And through the next day her regret increased that she had not dared his wrath and demanded a definite period to her suspense. Feelings unwontedly rebellious filled her that she must wait to know—rather, that John must wait.
Over the babe—their babe—she crooned her hope. To Adeline she whispered her apprehension. Something in the hard, planning look of the unfair fiend, in his superiority to any attempt at cleverness, in his abstraction even while listening to compliments over his driving——
When was afterward?