A faint, cold breath ran in the nerves of her body. She turned her head quickly away, as though, through their closed lids, his waking eyes could spy on her.
She had thought, child-blind, not of friendship, not of recognition for what she had spent, but of just that last bitter-sweet confidence when he would tell her, show her without words, perhaps, how much this new happiness would be to him. And he hid it from her!
Well, he was right. How impossible anything else was! There were barriers of gratitude—yes, and higher yet than those—barriers she herself had reared between them!
She stood, hands limply dropped, head bent. She saw shadows of jessamine leaves moving like fine, gray fingers on the sunny floor.
She had no more right in that room than the veriest stranger.
CHAPTER XIV
THE QUEEN’S COURTESY
THE cart drew up at the station with a bounce. Before it had fairly stopped, a large man in the clothes of a working citizen, with the umbrella and bag of a traveler, sprang out and made a rush for the door of the ticket-office.
A lean, brown fellow in riding-trousers, who was dawdling on the platform, stared and laughed.
“Holden, what’s the rush?”