For one instant a terrible look crossed her face—a sort of horror. She grew so white that he thought she would faint.
“You’re so kind——” she faltered.
“You mean you will?”
“I’ll have to think,” she answered. That was the answer he liked, modest, and prudent.
II
She altered strangely after that talk. Before his eyes she grew thinner and paler, looked really ill. A shadow lay over her, a trouble she could scarcely support. It distressed the good man very much in more ways than one, for he imagined she was struggling against her loyalty to her dead husband, and he was not only sorry for her, but jealous as well. She avoided him noticeably, and he was too proud and too kind to trouble her. In the office she was formal, almost hostile. All this hurt him and puzzled him; it was not until long, long after that he realised what a terrible thing was taking place in her queer little soul.
She didn’t want her child out of her sight. In the evening, when he came now and then to see her, she would sit with the little creature on her lap, pressed against her heart, sleepy and patient.
He began to fancy that he was in some way offensive to her, and little by little tried to resume his old manner, to be kind but quite impersonal. A faint resentment aided him; he called her Mrs. Naylor, and ceased to call on her at the hotel.
And, directly he began to draw back, she advanced. He permitted it. He wouldn’t see her hints; he waited until she actually asked him to call. She had tried to dress up a little, with a lace collar on her rusty old black blouse, and she had left Sandra upstairs, with a bag of candy and some new paper dolls. She was waiting in the Ladies’ Sitting Room, with the naked light illuming her sallow, anxious face; not pretty, not very young, not fresh, and in a decidedly disadvantageous situation. But fully able to cope with it.
“Mr. Petersen,” she said, very, very gravely, “some time ago you made me an offer. I have reason to believe that you regret it now. I want to tell you that you are quite free.”