Eddie had been so delighted with the change in her. She hadn’t seen much of him since his return at the end of the war, but all his hours with her had been a perpetual service of praise. He had hurried to her his first free minute; he had wanted to give her anything, everything—extravagantly and ridiculously. He had been tactful and kindly with the rather contemptuous Mrs. Kennedy. He had been to see Devery and Sillon, and had won their hearts. He had been quite perfect.
And all these thoughts were merely flitting across her mind like birds flying above a frozen pond. Under the ice were horrors beyond naming. She did her utmost to ignore them, to think of those things as dead and buried and forever gone from her world; but she could not.
All that night she had been dreaming of her drowned lover, floating, horribly, in the sea; and with him, directly beside him, her baby—their baby—its little body extended like his, its tiny white face upturned. And she and Eddie sat on the deck of a ship, she facing these two corpses which came smoothly along behind them, and she was using all her wit, all her charm, to keep Eddie from turning his head and seeing them.
The dream haunted her and mingled with her wretched thoughts. For now that she was within a stone’s throw of her goal, now that the cup was in her hand, to be raised to her lips, she was filled with a desperate impatience, a terrible fever of haste and fear. Her hands were burning, her knees weak and trembling.
"Oh, just this one more hour!" she murmured. "If only, only, only nothing will happen!"
She looked past the moment, to the haven of happy years beyond, as a man sailing a perilous channel might look ahead to the wide and quiet sea beyond.
"Something will happen!" she told herself. "At the last minute some one will tell him—scream it out in the church—stop the wedding. Oh, God! Just help me now! Let me get safely married to Eddie, and I’ll try my best to be good!"
She was conscious of being a little too pallid, too worn, and she rubbed on her smooth cheeks a little rouge. It looked horrible, and she wiped it off frantically.
"No! It must be my eyes that look so queer. I wonder if Eddie’ll notice, and think I look queer! It might make him suspicious."
She forced herself to smile.