“Well, you’ll be there soon now.”
“I don’t know,” he answered without moving. “I don’t know whether I shall.”
“You don’t know whether you’ll be home soon? The roads are open; the postman has come in.”
“I don’t know whether I’ll go home,” he repeated.
The snapping of the fire sounded loud upon the silence that followed. The thrill of strong emotions rising toward expression held them in a breathless, immovable quietude.
“Don’t you want to go home?” said the young girl. Her voice was low and she cleared her throat. In this interchange of commonplace sentences her heart had begun to beat so violently that it interfered with the ease of her speech.
Dominick leaned forward and dropped the crumpled letter into the fire.
“No, I don’t want to. I hate to.”
To this she did not reply at all, and after a moment he continued: “My home is unbearable to me. It isn’t a home. It’s a place where I eat and sleep, and I’d prefer doing that anywhere else, in any dirty boarding-house or fourth-rate hotel—I’d rather——”
He stopped abruptly and pushed the log farther in. The letter was caught up the chimney in a swirl of blackened scraps.