Next Sunday it would all be in The Era. Those words seemed written in letters of fire on the walls, and repeated themselves in maddening revolution in her mind. It would all be there, sensationally displayed as other old scandals had been. She saw the tragic secret of the two lives that had sheltered hers, the love that had been so sacred a thing written of with all the defiling brutality of the common scribe and his common reader, for all the world of the low and ignoble to jeer at and spit upon.
She stopped in her dressing and pressed her hands to her face. How could she live till next Sunday, and then, when Sunday came, live through it? There were three days yet before Sunday. Might not something be done in three days? But she could think of nothing. Something had happened to her brain. If there was only some one to help her!
And with that came the thought of Barron. A flash of relief went through her. He would help her; he would do something. She had no idea what, but something, and, uplifted by the idea, she opened the door and looked up the hall. She felt a sudden drop of hope when she saw that his door was closed. But she stole up the passage, watching it, not knowing what she intended saying to him, only actuated by the desire to throw her responsibilities on him and ask for his help.
The door was ajar and she listened outside it. There was no sound from within and no scent of cigar-smoke. She tapped softly and receiving no answer pushed it open and peered fearfully in. The room was empty. The man’s clothes were thrown about carelessly, his table littered with papers and books. From the crevice of the opened window came the smell and the sound of the rain, with a chill, bleak suggestion.
A sudden throttling sense of lonely helplessness overwhelmed her. She stood looking blankly about, at the ashes of cigars in a china saucer, at an old valise gaping open in a corner. The room seemed to her to have a vacated air, and she remembered hearing Barron, a few days before, speak of going to the mines again soon. Her mind leaped to the conclusion that he had gone. Her hopes suddenly fell around her in ruins, and in his looking-glass she saw a blanched face that she hardly recognized as her own.
Stealing back to her room she sat down on the bed again. The house was curiously quiet and in this silence her thoughts began once more to revolve round the one topic. Then suddenly they broke into a burst of rebellion. She could not bear it. She must go, somewhere, anywhere to escape. She would flee away like a hunted animal and hide, creeping into some dark distant place and cowering there. But where would she go, and what would she do? The world outside seemed one vast menace waiting to spring on her. If her head would stop aching and the fever that burned her body and clouded her brain would cease for a moment, she could think and come to some conclusion. But now—
And suddenly, as she thought, a whisper seemed to come to her, clear and distinct like a revelation—“You have your voice!”
It lifted her to her feet. For a moment the pain and confusion of developing illness left her, and she felt a thrill of returning energy. She had it still, the one great gift neither enemies nor misfortune could take from her—her voice!
The hope shook her out of the lethargy of fever, and her mind sprang into excited action like a loosened spring. She went to her desk and placed the gold back in its bag. The five hundred dollars that had seemed so meaningless had now a use. It would take her away to Europe. With the three hundred she still had in the bank, it would be enough to take her to Paris and leave her something to live on. Money went a long way over there, she had heard. She could study and sing and become famous.
It all seemed suddenly possible, almost easy. Only leaving would be hard—fearfully. She thought of the door up the passage and the voice that in those first days of her feebleness had called a greeting to her every morning; the man’s deep voice with its strong, cheery note. And then like a peevish child, sick and unreasonable, she found herself saying: