CHAPTER XVIII
MARCIA HADDON
DAVID JOSLIN wished nothing so much as to be quite alone. He did not rejoin his companions on the hill. Pleading his errand at Windsor, he set out at once down stream with no companion other than his own bitter thoughts. It seemed to him he never had known a longer or more terrible day, nor had the future ever appeared to him so hopeless and foredoomed.
It was yet daylight when he arrived at the little town, and he turned once more to the boarding house of the Widow Dunham. As he reached the gate he caught the fragrance of a cigar whose aroma was unusual in these parts. Unwilling to meet strangers, he halted an instant; but finding no way out of it, he advanced, an odd sort of conviction suddenly in his mind. Sitting there, almost as they had sat two years ago, he saw two figures, both familiar to him.
“Well, well,” growled the raucous voice of James Haddon as he turned. “What, what? We meet again! How’s this happen, stranger? Where you been all the while?”
Joslin shook the hand of each simply, without a word.
Haddon was heavier, redder, yet more coarsened by his manner of life, than when he last had seen him. The flesh hung puffily on his cheeks, drooped from his folded neck above his collar. His prominent eyes were yet more prominent and bulging.
As for his wife, it seemed more than ever as though she did not belong with him, as though she degraded herself by sitting even thus close to him.