“But Pete! He hasn’t come back, and maybe that means––”
She did not even finish the sentence, which simply faded away on her lips, a useless and foolish conjecture.
Another long silence followed. Seth’s cigarette went out, and hung dead from his bearded lips, while he stared gloomily into the blaze. He sat with his back toward the front door. Claire, near a corner of the big stone chimney, leaned forward, her head inclined to one side, the cheek resting on her open hand, the elbow on 331 her knee. Her eyes, which had been lifted from their long gazing at the fire at the moment she addressed her husband, were fixed on vacancy, looking past Huntington toward the door that led out upon the veranda, where the rising wind tossed little whirls of snow and dead leaves from the flower garden. She was torturing herself with a conjured vision of a wild, high place among snowbound rocks, in the midst of which a slender figure was slowly sinking down, and a white and stricken face was turned toward her. This was the vision that had become for her the settled picture of Marion’s fate, a picture that was burned into her brain by many, many hours of imagining, day and night.
The wind was howling around the ranch house, wailing among the gables, shrieking across the chimney top. It rattled at the door, as if to fling it open with sudden violence. And what was that? A footstep on the veranda? She shivered; it was only her shaken nerves again! Then came another rattle at the door. It moved. It was flung open. And there was the figure of her dream, but strangely and fantastically clad; and with a face that glowed, and lips that were parted in a smile.
For a moment Claire did not move. Then slowly she lifted her head; her eyes grew round and staring, her mouth opened. Seth caught the look; it was one he had seen many times before.
“Claire!” he cried. “Stop that!”
His voice, perhaps, served to break the spell. Claire leaped to her feet. And the next instant there was a voice from the doorway.
“Hello!” said Marion cheerily, in a “good evening” 332 kind of tone, as if she had returned from the post-office.
Huntington bounded from his chair, and whirled around with an oath,––one oath surely that was forgiven him. But past him, with a scream dashed Claire.
“Marion!” she shrieked.