She leaned her elbow on the arm of the chair and covered her eyes with her hand. Eustace, drawing a long breath, but admiring this astonishing adaptability to a rôle so foreign to her, leaned back in his chair and began to talk on a low and vibrating note; expressing his hopes and fears, his longings and doubts, with considerable art; for, he told himself, he said not a word too much nor too little. At the end of ten minutes he asked her a question. There was no answer. He bent over her. She was fast asleep.
He refrained from shaking her roughly, but shake her he did.
She sprang to her feet and yawned in his face. “Oh, Eustace, how rude of me! But your voice was so soothing and I was nearly dead with sleep. Hated to be so impolite as to tell you—we’ll have to continue on page 181 from page 2. Good night, dear Eustace, and forgive me.”
And she slipped by him like a trout under water and up the stair.
CHAPTER XII
Gita arrived at the manor in time for dinner and spent the greater part of the night wandering about the house, which she had ordered to be lit from drawing-room to attic. She was so glad to be there—and alone—that she felt no inclination to sleep, and even the haunting terrors of the past week were banished for the moment.
She had a quite personal species of humor that she could invoke at will, and a large surface-tract in her mind upon which she had lived abundantly during the past year. But, always ruthlessly honest with herself, she had begun to suspect, even before that remarkably odd outbreak under the goading of De Witt Turner, that something had been going on underneath that broad and fertile surface which it was time for her to tweak to the light and examine. She had turned from it in terror, almost in horror, and had permitted herself a respite until she was alone at her manor.
But on this night of her return she felt only happiness and content. This was hers, her own domain, memoried, beautiful, and intensely personal; so personal that she had at times the impression she had lived in this house consecutively for two hundred and sixty-three years. It seemed to return her passionate devotion, to enfold her, to promise her peace, possibly happiness. She exulted in every stone of it, and drew her hand lovingly across the old pieces of furniture, less sensible of their value than of their intimate association with the past.
She could remain here for the rest of her life if she chose, denying even Eustace hospitality, and she had a sense of freedom, of buoyancy, vastly different from the superficial enjoyments of the past winter in New York. They had been novel and entrancing, but both novelty and charm had worn thin; and they had served their purpose. No woman is complete until she has had her experience of the lighter pleasures of life; barely conscious of the depths underneath until frivolities turn into débris and balance is established.
She had long suspected that she knew a good deal more than she admitted to herself, both apart from her personal ego and inextricably entangled with it, and it was time to find out what it was. She was uneasy, frightened, but determined.