He sobered suddenly at her tone. “Look here, you won’t run away in the night, will you? I promise you—I swear to you—I’ll play the game.”
What game, she wondered? But she did not put the wonder into words.
“I have nowhere to run to,” she said, and turned away from him that he might not see the bitterness on her face.
When she returned with the handkerchiefs she was a practical self once more. But she was beginning to be conscious of intense physical weariness, and she felt a sense of gratitude to him for noticing it.
“I say, you are tired! You’ve been ill, haven’t you?”
“I am well again,” she said.
He swept the assurance aside. “You don’t look it. Don’t bother about me any more! Oh, well, just tie a wet pad over it and then leave me to my fate!”
He became urgent in his solicitude and the knowledge that he was suffering considerably himself made her respond far more graciously than would otherwise have been the case.
But when it was over at last, when she was alone in the strange room and realized how completely that night’s happenings had changed the whole course of her life, a blackness of despair came down upon her, more overwhelming than any she had ever known. She cast herself down just as she was and wept out her agony till sheer exhaustion came upon her and she drifted at last into the merciful oblivion of dreamless sleep.