The girl nestled close. “Just you and me ... all alone in the universe.”
“Sweetheart,” Hal slipped his arm around her waist and laid his cheek against hers, “it’s all fixed with my father. He’s set on having me go to Pratt; but he’s agreed on an allowance that ought to take care of two. We’re in luck that you can cook. And you won’t mind a little flat? I can count on Adelaide to help us out if we get in a pinch. Of course my mother’ll raise Cain—and I’ll be on the lookout for a job, from the start. If they think I’m going to wait all that time for you—why, I can’t, Eileen!”
The girl’s breath came so thick, it choked her. The dancers swam dizzily before her eyes. The saplings in the little grove took up the dance, swaying with uncertain rhythm, their lithe trunks bending to the tumult in her brain. “Do you love me well enough to get along that way for a year or two? Will you come to me, sweetheart, when I send for you?”
And then the rain. Men and women went scurrying to places of shelter. The thin grove, the pavilion with its dilapidated roof, the mine house—whose inner spaces were always barred to the public as soon as the last workman had gone—these offered meagre protection. Over there behind the mine dump was a corn crib and feed room where provender for the now obsolete pit mules had formerly been kept. No one else had thought of this refuge. Hal and Eileen were alone, the rain pounding on the rusty tin roof to the tune of their madly beating hearts.
V
How long Judith lay asleep she did not know. She was aroused at length by voices, so close that they seemed to emanate from the lawn beneath her window. She tried to move. Her arm, her neck, her shoulder creaked with pain. She must have been there in that cramped position a long time. Her hair and her thin negligée were quite damp. As her scattered senses collected themselves she realized that the sound came from beyond the wall. A voice, hoarse with rapture, Eileen’s voice, murmured over and over:
“Oh, darling, I never knew I loved you until now.”
Some high platitude touching manly fidelity punctuated the girl’s impassioned utterance. The façade of the house lay in ghostly shadows that enveloped the figures completely. But out there across the lawn lay the white moonlight, frosting the wet grass with a shimmering incrustation of unearthly jewels. Hal Marksley’s substantial form came like a skulking wraith from the gloom, gliding along the thin edge of the shadow until he reached a convenient screen of shrubs, vaulted over the wall and crossed close beneath Judith’s casement. He was cranking the reluctant engine of his motor car, out there in the side street, as the clock in the chapel tower struck three.
VI
It was ten o’clock when Eileen came down stairs, refused breakfast and wandered listlessly out into the hot July air. She was pale and her full lips were swollen. Her eyes were set in murky pools of shadow, as yellow as ochre, beneath their screen of long lashes, and her blond braids hung stiff and obdurate. As she entered the summer house, Theodora greeted her with a derisive gesture.