Mrs. Morris stifled an outcry and would have left him, but he would not let her.
"Stay! Oh, listen to a soul in torment! The babe is already motherless. Isabel can never return, mother; she is with the dead. I am not waiting idly here for her; I am waiting busily—for her slayer. He has fled; but when he sees he is not pursued he will come back to the spot,—to the black, black hole. He cannot help it. I know that. Oh, how well I know it! And the moment he comes he is caught,—caught in the web of proofs I am weaving!"
He held her arm and gazed into her gazing eyes in ferocious fear of the web she might be weaving for him; while she, reeling sick with fear of him, tried with all her shaken wits to sham an impassioned accord.
"And you will wait?" she exclaimed approvingly. "You will not stir till the thing is sure?"
He would not stir till the thing was sure.
As soon as it was dark enough to slip over to the Byingtons' unseen, she went, bearing to Ruth Isabel's apologetic good-bys, trying her small best to play at words with the General, and quickly getting away again, grateful for a breath of their atmosphere, though distressfully convinced that Ruth had divined the whole trouble, through the joy betrayed by herself on hearing that Leonard would be away for a week.
She went home and slept like a weary child, and neither the next day nor the next, nor the next, was so awful as this first had been; they lacked the crackle and glare, and the crash, of the burning and falling temple.