The Land of Content

by Edith Barnard Delano

He answered, for such a greeting had passed between them many times before, and was not to be ignored. But when the sleigh stopped beside her she cried out at the drawn whiteness of his face.

"Oh!" she cried, her hand over her heart, "you are ill!"

But he managed to smile, and threw aside his worn old fur rug with an inviting gesture. "Ill? Not a bit of it! Let me give you a lift to the cottage!"

Mechanically she took her place beside him, and he urged White Rosy on. She looked at him with anxious eyes and parted lips, feeling all the while as if she were in some bewildered dream, where the real was unreal, where everything was distorted—like itself, yet strangely unlike.

Always before they had talked as fancy led them, or were comfortably silent; now he was so unlike himself as to manufacture small-talk, commonplaces, nothings. There was no reference to his not having been to the cottage, no hint of having missed her, no least word, in fact, of anything personal between them. He talked on, almost feverishly, without looking at her, while she sat there numbly, dazed at the change in him, but wounded far beyond other thought or speculation.

He stopped the sleigh in front of the brown house, and she got down without looking at him; and still without speaking she went inside. He had not so much as suggested her driving on with him, as she had done half a hundred times before!

Grace, in a deep basket chair, was smilingly watching the pretty group before the fire—Eleanor, teaching the two children how to pop corn, with Tim on her knee vigorously shaking the wire basket. They looked up as Rosamund entered, and at sight of the girl's face Eleanor put Timmy quickly down from her lap and jumped up, with a little anxious cry.

But Rosamund blindly, unheeding, went past them and up to her own room. She closed the door and locked it, and made some incoherent answer to Eleanor's entreaties. She never knew how long she sat there, silent, motionless, without removing her hat or coat, dumbly trying to control the mingled shame and longing that surged through her. Vainly she searched through her memory for an explanation; she had done nothing to offend him, no least thing that should estrange him. Even now she could not believe that he would wantonly hurt her; her faith in their love had rooted itself too deep in her heart to be easily disturbed.

At last she called upon her pride for help, only to find that pride itself lay sorely wounded. But it was that which enabled her at last to lay aside hat and coat, to bathe her face and rearrange her hair, even to dress herself in her most becoming gown—that sure refuge of a suffering woman!—and go downstairs to meet Eleanor's questioning, anxious eyes. It was not until Ogilvie came back later in the day, for a hasty call at an hour when he knew the entire household would be assembled, that anger came, mercifully, to her relief. She saw that he wished to make it seem as if he had always come at that hour, as if his visits were habitually that far apart; she understood that he was determined to make it impossible for her to ask wherein he suspected her of offense. He meant to give her no opportunity to explain or demand explanation; instead, he was taking this way of turning back the hands of the clock. He was deliberately withdrawing from their intimacy, putting their friendship back upon a plane of formality. It would seem as if he were trying to show her that his feelings had changed. Yet she had faced her own love too frankly, in her heart's secret communings, to be able to deny it now. She could only, in an agony of shame, tell herself at last that she had been deceived in his.

The days that followed were full of misery for her. All her life she had been the center of a little world of love and admiration. For the first time some one had turned from her; the pain of it was not lessened because the one who spurned her had come to hold first place in her heart. Yet such was her attitude that not even Eleanor dared say a word which might touch upon the subject ever so remotely. Eleanor did, indeed, watch her with yearning eyes, and Rosamund, sensitive in her suffering, believed that she talked of her with Grace and Mother Cary; but it was only by their avoidance of Ogilvie's name that they showed any suspicion of what was in her heart. Had Eleanor dared to speak, Rosamund would not have been able to silence her; for she needed every atom of her strength to appear unconscious and natural whenever Ogilvie came. She would not avoid him. She could only be feverishly gay before him; and Eleanor noticed how much more grimly his face set itself after each visit.