He sat before her, relaxing now, and trembling. His look of ecstasy darkened and glimmered out, while his eyes took on their old tortured stare. When he spoke, the softness and breathless simplicity were gone from his voice, which sounded muddy and harsh. He beat with one fist against his forehead.
“I’ve been a fool—all my life, such a fool!” he muttered.
The little hectic colour died from his cheeks, and in his eyes she saw stealing again the awful look of torturing hunger for opium, which no power could stifle any more.
But she spoke to him very gently. “I understand now, Ferd. I understand it all.”
And she thought: “It was my price.”
Wearily and mechanically, while he slunk away to the cot where his smoking materials always were, Stella’s hands took up the work which had fallen into her lap. She sat sewing, just as she had sat beside the hearth the day he had begged her not to stop. “You don’t know how charming it is to see a woman sitting before the fire, busy with needlework,” he had said. There was a waif in his heart and he had married her.
But the tears were spent, and there was nothing left now but time and silence.