XXIII
A LESSON FROM DOROTHY
FOR ten days after the surgical operation, Kilgariff lay abed, his head, neck, and shoulders held rigidly immovable by a wooden framework devised for that purpose. Otherwise than as regarded the wound, he seemed perfectly well, and the wound itself healed satisfactorily under Arthur Brent’s skilful treatment.
In his constrained position it was impossible for the wounded man to hold a book before his eyes, and so, to relieve the tedium of his convalescence, Dorothy read to him for several hours each day.
He had vaguely hoped, without formulating the thought, that Evelyn would render him this service, as she had done during his first illness. But this time she came not. Every day—until the success of the operation was fully assured, she inquired anxiously concerning his condition; but at no time did she visit him, or ask to do so. When at last Arthur so far relaxed the mechanical restraints that Kilgariff was able to sit below stairs in the porch when the weather permitted, and before a “great, bearded fire” in the hallway if it were too cool out of doors—for the autumn was now advanced—he was sorely disappointed to learn that Evelyn was no longer at Wyanoke. She had somewhat suddenly decided to stay at Branton, for a week or ten days, as the guest of Edmonia Bannister.
All this set Kilgariff thinking, and the thinking was by no means comfortable. Did Evelyn’s course mean indifference on her part? It would have given him some pain to believe that, but it would have relieved him greatly. In that case, he might go away and never come back, without fear of any harm to her or any wrong-doing on his own account. In that case, the problem that so sorely vexed him would be completely solved.
Certainly that was the outcome of the matter which he was bound to hope for. Yet the very suggestion that such might be the end of it all distressed him more than he had thought that any possible solution of the difficulty could do.
But, in fact, Owen Kilgariff knew better. When he recalled what had gone before, he could not doubt the interpretation of Evelyn’s avoidance of him, and this thought troubled him even more than the other. It brought back to him all the perplexities of that problem with which he had been so hopelessly wrestling ever since that morning at the stables.
What should he do? What could he do? These questions were insistent, and he could give no answer to them. At one moment his old thought of a parity of disability came back to him—the thought that as she was the daughter of a gambling adventurer, the obligation on his part not to seek her love or win it might not be altogether binding. But then flashed into his mind a memory of her words:—