“I really did know a Mrs. Rice who lived somewhere in this neighborhood when I was a little girl,” she resumed. “Such a dear old lady. And somehow, in my desperation, I thought of h-her.” She was wiping her eyes with a small handkerchief. “You must think I’m so weak and s-silly!”
“Oh, no!” said Edward politely.
A fatalistic gloom enveloped him. He felt no curiosity at all. He knew not where he was going, or why; and what chiefly occupied his mind was a profound longing for a smoke and a hat. With a cigar, he felt, he could have regained his philosophic outlook. With a hat, he could have faced this situation more like a man of the world. He had neither, and he was walking off into the night, away from home.
The lights of the town made him anxious that the lady should dry her tears.
“I think it’s going to rain,” he observed in an easy, conversational tone. “Country needs rain badly.”
He might have known that it wouldn’t work. She paid no attention whatever to this remark.
“I only want to hide,” she said. “If I could have found dear old Mrs. Rice! That driver—he was so awful! He was going to drive out into the country and murder me. I saw it in his face. And then you came!”
“I happened to be there,” Edward corrected her.
“Isn’t it strange, the way things happen?” she said in a low, intense voice. “Doesn’t it seem like fate?”
It did. Edward said nothing. He was trying to invent some excuse for getting his[Pg 229] arm away from her before they passed any shops where he was known. He failed to do so, however. The lights in all the shops on the main street shone upon him, hatless, with the desperate lady clinging to him.