"I 'm going to have this blank thing out. I 'm going to Armstrong's house. I won't stand it another hour. I 'll be home presently."
She tried to tell him how sorry she was, and to say some one of the little loving, wifely things with whose warm, sun-penetrated atmosphere she so enveloped his life that he took them as a matter of course. It is doubtful if he heard her altogether, for her voice was fainter than usual.
"Won't you come in a minute?" she pleaded. He did hear that. But he did not come.
"Oh, I can't stop now," he returned petulantly. "I 'm in such blank torment. I 'll be back; I may go to the club afterwards, and play it off at something, but I'll be back before midnight."
"Dear?" she called then, in an agitated voice; it was not like hers, and not like her; if he had perceived this—but he perceived nothing. "I don't feel quite well"—she tried to say. But he was halfway downstairs. These five words wandered after him like the effort of a dumb spirit to communicate with deaf life.
He thrust himself savagely into his overcoat, turned up the collar over his toothache, slammed the front door, and went.
Jean listened to his footfall on the steps, on the sidewalk; the nervous, irritable, uneven sound softened and ceased. She was quite awake, and her mind moved with feverish vitality. She was usually a good sleeper for a sick person; but that night she found herself too ill for any form of rest. The difficulty that she had in breathing increased with an insidious slowness which she had learned to fear as the most obstinate form of her malady. The room grew empty of air. The candle burned blue to her eyes. The shutting of the front door seemed like the shutting of that to which she would not give a name, for terror's sake. As her husband's footsteps passed from the power of her strained ears to overtake them, she found herself wondering how they would sound when they passed for the last time from her presence, she lying under a load of flowers, with the final look of the sky turned compassionately upon her. Then she scorned herself—she was the most healthy-minded invalid who ever surmounted the morbidness of physical suffering—and thrust out her hands from her face, as if she were thrusting a camera which was using defective plates away from her brain.
"If he had only come in a minute!" she said, sobbing a little. "If he had only come in and kissed me good-night"—
She did not add: "He would have seen that I was too ill. He would not have left me."
The candle burned faintly, and grew more faint. There seemed to be smoke in the room. The baby stirred in his crib, and Pink, from the nursery, called, "Mummer dee!" in her sleep. The air grew so dense that it seemed to Jean to be packed about her like smothering wool. She rang the electric bell for Molly, or she thought she did. But Molly did not answer, and the nursery door was shut.