Stella laid a hand on his in an effort to calm him, though her own heart was on the dizzy edge of chaos.
The candlelight threw up before her a face dead white against a moving background of shadows. Slowly she felt him relax. The grasp on her wrist lessened, until finally his hands were moving about vaguely like moths that cannot find the light. She looked down and saw dimly the dull red marks he had left.
She drooped a little and felt all at once very weary. Her husband sat on the edge of the bed, his back bent and his shoulders sagging heavily toward his knees. All the old lordliness in him seemed burnt to cinders.
After a while he sighed a long sigh and slowly got to his feet. He had put the candle down, and when he reached out for it, his hand was so unsteady that he knocked it over, extinguishing the flame. She heard him sigh again in the thick darkness of the room, and then grope his way out.
III
Another night he seemed to be trying to fit an endless throng to shoes. He was upon his knees, and they came up before him tirelessly out of a void. Stella wakened and crept, trembling a little, to the door opening into the “parlour.” Here the air was heavy with fumes. He throve best in such an atmosphere.
She listened, enthralled in a way. Stella was coming to feel almost impartial, like an outsider—an outsider even to herself.
Her husband’s voice drifted to her, hollow and touchingly patient; but sometimes it sounded a little eager, too—as when he urged:
“Madam, I think you could wear an A quite as well as a B. Have you ever tried? The foot is really narrower than you think. Let me try on one of the newest lasts in an A, and if it doesn’t feel comfortable, we’ll try a B instead. I think you’ll find this suede quite satisfactory, and it goes so well with almost every gown.”