“By God, yes!” he shouted, reaching out to her with both hands.
She shrank back a little, not from reluctance but from a sense of paralyzing inadequacy. “It’s I who am old now,” she thought with a shiver.
“What—you really would come with me? The day after tomorrow?” she said.
“I’d come with you today, if there was enough of it left to get us anywhere.” He stood looking at her, waiting for her to speak; then, as she remained silent, he slowly drew back a step or two. “Kate—this isn’t one of your jokes?”
As she returned his look she was aware that her sight of him was becoming faintly blurred. “Perhaps it was, when I began. It isn’t now.” She put her hands in his.
XXVIII.
IN the stillness of the sleeping house she sat up with a start, plucked out of a tormented sleep.
“But it can’t be—it can’t be—it can’t be!”
She jumped out of bed, turned on the light, and stared about her. What secret warning had waked her with that cry on her lips? She could not recall having dreamed: she had only tossed and fought with some impalpable oppression. And now, as she stood there, in that hideously familiar room, the silence went on echoing with her cry. All the excuses, accommodations, mitigations, mufflings, disguisings, had dropped away from the bare fact that her lover was going to marry her daughter, and that nothing she could do would prevent it.
A few hours ago she had still counted on the blessed interval of time, the lulling possibilities of delay. She had kissed Anne goodnight very quietly, she remembered. Then it was eleven o’clock of the night before; now it was the morning of the day. A pitch-black winter morning: there would be no daylight for another three hours. No daylight—but the Day was here!