"Please, ma'am," eyes round with astonishment, "there's your trunk a-standing in the passage. Stumbled over it, I did, when I come in from outside. An' I wondered——"
"It can go up to the bedroom." Kathleen disdainfully withheld explanation. "It isn't heavy, Maggie. I'll give you a hand with it."
Maggie backed.
"Oh, and Maggie, put on some hot milk, will you, for the master? and pour a little brandy into it; a teaspoonful."
Gareth stood listening to the bumping on the stairs, as the box was carried back to its old quarters. The fever of his mood had ebbed, till nothing remained of the glow and the exhilaration. He only knew he was tired and rather chilly; that Kathleen had not gone—would still be with him to-morrow, and all the days; between them that new barrier of silence, denser even than the old they had in their recent anger battered down.... "I don't think to-night need be mentioned again."
If he had waited one half-minute longer. Certainly it had been a good hour. But had he realized that his burden would in consequence be fastened on him for the rest of his life, he might perhaps have waited that half-minute longer....
In the bedroom upstairs, Kathleen stood at the window; behind her, the locked trunk and the untidy litter of packing. The dark wind whistled dismally, tore at the branches that swayed and bent and creaked resistance. The air was a whirl with fluttering patches and tatters. Kathleen shivered as she felt the malevolent draughts blowing in between the chinks, and down the chimney and under the door. What a restless shrieking tormented world, this last night of October!
Kathleen shivered.... "Shadders risin' 'twixt you an' me"—croaked an echo of the raucous tones of the street-singer outside Napier's rooms.... Was Napier on his way South?
She heard Gareth coughing below.
Then she moved away from the window, and her eye caught the calendar hanging on the wall; a cheap calendar, containing a picture of kittens playing, and under it the date—November 30th.