The pen dropped from her fingers and she sank down upon her desk, her head bowed in the hollow of her bare arm, shaken from head to foot with the violence of the crudest grief she had ever known. Bennett threw his journal from him, and came to her, taking her in his arms, putting her head upon his shoulder.
"Why, Lloyd, what is it—why, old chap, what the devil! I was a beast to read that to you. It wasn't really as bad as that, you know, and besides, look here, look at me. It all happened three years ago. It's all over with now."
Without raising her head, and clinging to him all the closer, Lloyd answered brokenly:
"No, no; it's not all over. It never, never will be."
"Pshaw, nonsense!" Bennett blustered, "you must not take it to heart like this. We're going to forget all about it now. Here, damn the book, anyhow! We've had enough of it to-day. Put your hat on. We'll have the ponies out and drive somewhere. And to-night we'll go into town and see a show at a theatre."
"No," protested Lloyd, pushing back from him, drying her eyes. "You shall not think I'm so weak. We will go on with what we have to do—with our work. I'm all right now."
Bennett marched her out of the room without more ado, and, following her, closed and locked the door behind them. "We'll not write another word of that stuff to-day. Get your hat and things. I'm going out to tell Lewis to put the ponies in."
But that day marked a beginning. From that time on Lloyd never faltered, and if there were moments when the iron bit deeper than usual into her heart, Bennett never knew her pain. By degrees a course of action planned itself for her. A direct appeal to Bennett she believed would not only be useless, but beyond even her heroic courage. She must influence him indirectly. The initiative must appear to come from him. It must seem to him that he, of his own accord, roused his dormant resolution. It was a situation that called for all her feminine tact, all her delicacy, all her instinctive diplomacy.
The round of their daily life was renewed, but now there was a change. It was subtle, illusive, a vague, indefinite trouble in the air. Lloyd had addressed herself to her task, and from day to day, from hour to hour, she held to it, unseen, unnoticed. Now it was a remark dropped as if by chance in the course of conversation; now an extract cut from a newspaper or scientific journal, and left where Bennett would find it; now merely a look in her eyes, an instant's significant glance when her gaze met her husband's, or a moment's enthusiasm over the news of some discovery. Insensibly and with infinite caution she directed his attention to the world he believed he had abjured; she called into being his interest in his own field of action, reading to him by the hour from the writings of other men, or advancing and championing theories which she knew to be false and ridiculous, but which she goaded him to deny and refute.
One morning she even feigned an exclamation of unbounded astonishment as she opened the newspaper while the two were at breakfast, pretending to read from imaginary headlines.