She laughed and drank some water. Her laugh did not sound to her own ears convincing and she was aware that, while Hannah was evidently satisfied by her explanation, Hazel was eying her ponderingly.
“Well, if he’s got insomnia,” said Hannah, “he’d better take his holiday right now. That’s the best thing to do. Take it in the beginning. Before father took ill——”
Here Josh interrupted her, as Hannah’s reminiscences of the late contractor’s last illness were long and exhaustive.
“Where’d you say he’d gone?” he queried.
“I can’t remember the name,” Berny answered with skilfully-assumed indifference; “somewhere down toward Santa Cruz and Monterey, some new place. And he may not stay there. If he doesn’t like it, he’ll just move around from place to place.”
“Why didn’t you go, too?” said Pearl.
This was the second question Berny had dreaded. Now suddenly she felt her throat contract and her lips quiver. Her usually iron nerve had been shaken by her passion of the night before and the shock of the morning. The unwonted sensations of gloom and apprehension closed in on her again, and this time made her feel weak and tearful.
“I didn’t want to. I hate moving round,” she said, pushing her chair back from the table. Her voice was a little hoarse, and suddenly feeling the sting of tears under her eyelids she raised her hands to her hat and began to fumble with her veil. “Why should I leave my comfortable flat to go trailing round in a lot of half-built hotels? That sort of thing doesn’t appeal to me at all. I like my own cook, and my own bed, and my own bath-tub. I’m more of an old maid than Hannah. Well, so long, people. I must be traveling.”
She laid her napkin on the table and jumped up with an assumption of brisk liveliness. She paid no attention to the expostulations of her relatives, but going to the glass arranged her hat and put on her gloves. When she turned back to the table she had regained possession of herself. Her veil was down and through it her cheeks looked unusually flushed, and her dark eyes, with their slanting outer corners, brighter and harder than ever. She hurried through her good-bys on the plea that she had shopping to do, and almost ran out of the house, leaving a trail of perfumery and high, artificial laughter behind her.
For the next week she waited for news from Dominick and none came. It was a trying seven days. Added to her harassment of mind, the loneliness of the flat was almost unendurable. There was no one to speak to, no one to share her anxieties. Her position was unusually friendless. When her marriage had lifted her from the ranks of working women she had shown so cold a face to her old companions that they had dropped away from her, realizing that she wished to cut all ties with the world of her humble beginnings. New friends had been hard to make. The wives of some of the bank officials, and odd, aspiring applicants for such honors as would accrue from even this remote connection with the august name of Ryan, were all she had found wherewith to make a circle and a visiting list.