"That ought to make her disappear to-night. Her friends will hide her. The mere fact of her disappearance will convince the police, as well as the reporters, that she is guilty. You are all right." He spoke boyishly, and his face, no longer rigid, was full of light.
"But if she is innocent?"
"No harm done. She'll be smuggled out of the country and suspicion permanently diverted from you. That is all I care about." He caught her hands impulsively in his. "I am glad, so glad! Oh!—It is too soon now, but wait—" He was out of the house before she grasped the fact that he had arrested himself on the brim of another declaration.
Mrs. Balfame went up to bed, serene once more in the belief that her future was her own, unclouded, full of attractive possibilities for a woman of her position and intellectual attainments.
She made up her mind to take a really deep course of reading, so that the most spiteful should not call her superficial; moreover, she had been conscious more than once of certain mental dissatisfactions, of uneasy vacancies in a mind sufficiently awake to begin to realise the cheapness of its furnishings. Perhaps she would take a course in history at Columbia, another in psychology.
As she put herself into a sturdy cotton night-gown and then brushed back her hair from a rather large forehead before braiding it severely for the night, she realised dimly that that way happiness might lie, that the pleasures of the intellectual life might be very great indeed. She wished regretfully that she could have been brilliantly educated in her youth. In that case she would not have married a man who would incite any spirited woman to seek the summary release, but would be to-day the wife of a judge, perhaps—some fine fellow who had showed the early promise that Dwight Rush must have done. If she could attract one man like that, at the age of forty-two, she could have had a dozen in her train when young if she had had the sense to appreciate them.
But she was philosophical, and it was not her way to quarrel very deeply with herself or with life. Her long braids were as evenly plaited as ever.
She sank into sleep, thinking of the disagreeable necessity of making the kitchen fire in the morning and cooking her own breakfast. Frieda of course would be gone.