"Who the devil's that?"
The inclination to shout back—"What the devil's that to you?" she had clipped on the tip of her tongue; but only for Sally's sake.
On this evening, then, that the settlement was drawn up, Sally had slowly climbed the stairs to the floor above, and once in her little sitting-room, with the door closed behind her, she had seated herself upon the settee near the fireplace and gazed into the cheerless, unlighted fire with dry and tearless eyes.
To her, the shadow of the end fell on everything. Just a little more than three years and a bend in the road had shown it stretching across her path. True, it was only a shadow. He had said nothing whatever about leaving her; had not even suggested it in the slightest word he had uttered. She must pass through the shadow, then; but what lay upon the other side was beyond her knowledge, though not beyond her fear.
To drive the apprehensions from her mind, she rose suddenly, shrugging shoulders, as though her blood were cold, and went to the piano. Without thinking, she sat down, began to play; then her hands lifted from the keys as if they burnt her touch. She had as suddenly remembered. Traill was below. For a moment longer she sat there, just touching, feeling the notes with the tips of her fingers—listening to the sounds in her mind—then she rose, standing motionless, attentive to all the little noises in the room below.
She heard the clink of a glass. He was taking his whisky. The sound indicated that he would soon be going to bed. She glanced at the clock, ticking daintily on her mantelpiece. It was just after eleven. Thoughts, calculations began to wander to her mind. Downstairs, he had said good night, kissed her—gently, as he always did—and opened the door for her as she came upstairs. But then he did that every night. Every evening he kissed her, every evening he said good night; but then perhaps, some half-hour later, she would hear him mounting the stairs to her room, and her heart would hammer like steel upon an anvil until he had knocked at her door and she had whispered—"Come in."
Would he come up that evening, she wondered. Two weeks now had passed since he had been to her thus, and so her mind—searching, as it would seem, for its trouble—intuitively connected the circumstance with this event of the settlement. So she drove herself to judge him by the lowest standards—those standards to which a woman at last resorts when she thinks she sees the waning of her influence. That in the heart of them they seldom put first, but last. Yet in the ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is, in a man, the soonest to come and the soonest to go, while fondness, caring and affection may remain behind, untouched by its departure. The beast in the every man has little to do with the intellect, and it is with his intellect, above all things, that he loves truest and most of all.
But here Sally fell into that most common of women's mistakes. She judged him by his passions. If she did not hear his footsteps on the stairs that night; if his knock did not fall upon the door and startle the silence in her heart into a thousand pulsating echoes, then she knew that she would be one step nearer to the realization that it was the end indeed.
She looked again at the clock and then, with sudden decision, went into the other room and began to undress. From a drawer in the Chippendale chest which he had bought her, she brought forth a new nightdress, in-let with dainty openwork, which a few days before she had purchased. This she put on. Then she went to the mirror, scrutinizing herself in its polished reflection. Her hair was untidy. She took it all down and put it up afresh, curling the long strands around her fingers as he had often said he had loved to see them. When that was finished, she sprayed herself with scent—on her hair, her arms, her breast, turning the spray, before it spluttered into silence, in the direction of the pillow upon which she slept. Finally, she knelt down by her bedside and prayed—
"Oh God—let him love me—always—always; show me how I can keep him to love me—always—always."