Katharine closed the front door behind her and went out into the street. As she descended the neat white stone steps she was close to the open windows of the little sitting-room and could have heard anything which might have been said within. But no sound of voices reached her. She could not help glancing over her shoulder towards the window, as she turned away, and she could see that Hester was still standing with her back to it, as she had stood when Katharine had insisted upon taking leave of her.
She walked slowly homewards, wondering what was taking place since she had left the two together, and going over in her mind the details of the scene. She remembered Crowdie’s face very distinctly. She was not sure that she had ever in her life seen a man badly frightened before, and it had produced a very vivid impression upon her at the time. And she recalled the picture of Hester, standing in the doorway, the pasteboard at her feet, and her hand raised to support herself against the doorway. She had heard of ‘domestic tragedies,’ as they are called in the newspapers, and she wondered whether they ever began in that way.
CHAPTER XXX.
Hester Crowdie heard Katharine’s footfall outside, and did not move from her position at the window until she had listened to the last retreating echo of the young girl’s light step upon the pavement. It was very still after that, for Lafayette Place is an unfrequented corner—a quiet island, as it were, round which the great rivers of traffic flow in all directions. Only now and then a lumbering van thunders through it, to draw up at the great printing establishment at the southeast corner, or a private carriage rolls along and stops, with a discreet clatter, at the Bishop’s House, on the west side, almost opposite the Crowdies’ dwelling.
But as Hester stood in silence, with her back to the window, her eyes rested with a fixed look on her husband’s face. He was pale, and his own beautiful eyes had lost their self-possessed calm. He looked at her, but his glance shifted quickly from one point to another—from her throat to her shoulder, from her hair to the window behind her—in a frightened and anxious way, avoiding her steady gaze.
What he had done was harmless enough, if not altogether innocent, in itself. That there had been something not exactly right about it, or about the way in which he had done it, was indirectly proved by Katharine’s own quick displeasure. But he knew, himself, how much it had meant to Hester, over, above and beyond any commonly simple interpretation which might be put upon it. His face and manner showed that he knew it, long before she spoke the first word of what was to come.
“Walter!”
She uttered his name in a low tone that quivered with the pain she felt, full of suffering, and reproach, and disappointment. Instantly his eyes fell before hers, but he answered nothing. He looked at his own white hand as it rested on the back of a chair.
“Look at me!” she said, almost sharply, with a rising intonation.
He looked up timidly, and a slight flush appeared on his pale forehead, but not in his cheeks.