“Now you have finished your tea, and I must go to the children’s ward. I have put you with Lois till the strangeness of it wears off, and you can have a separate room whenever you like.”
Leaning forward, she brushed Margaret’s cheek lightly with her lips and went quickly out of the room.
In spite of her misery, a shy feeling of comfort had come into Margaret’s heart. She rose and surveyed herself in the mirror over the mantel, drawing a deep breath and raising her shoulders as she did so. It was an unconscious trick of hers.
“Oh, no!” she said half aloud, “that is the temptation. I want to think it, and it can’t be true. I want to! The want in me is bad! How can it be true?” “The nobility of the human side of us”—ah, that had come from the calm poise of a wholesome understanding! It was noble—this human side—but not king. What of this strange mastery that overflowed her, the actual ache for the glow of his eyes, the pressure of his fingers? The mere memory of it was like a live coal to her cheeks. It burned her. The feel of his strong hair was in the fibrous touch of her gown. His mouth, smiling at the corners, warmed her shoulder. His bodily presence was all about her; it breathed upon her, and her soul reeled and shut its eyes like a drunken man!
Margaret tossed her hands above her head, the wrists dropping crosswise upon the shearing pillow of her flame-washed hair. In the mirror she saw the pale oval of her face in this living setting. As she gazed, the features warmed and changed; the eyes became Daunt’s eyes—the mouth, Daunt’s mouth. It was Daunt’s face, as she had looked up into it framed in her arms on the sun-brilliant beach. The wind was all about her, fresh and odorous, and his kisses were falling upon her seasalt lips!
Still holding her arms raised, she leaned to the mirror and kissed the glass hungrily. Her breath sighed the picture dim. The magic of it was gone, and Margaret, glancing fearfully behind her, turned and ran breathless to her room, where she locked the door and threw herself upon the bed, pressing her face down into the soft pillow gaspingly, to shut out the vivid passion-laden odor of bruised roses that seemed to pursue her, filling all her senses like a far-faint smell of musk.
XV.
Margaret passed along through the light-freshened ward, following Lois closely, and fighting desperately the active feeling of nausea which almost overcame her. All her sensitive nature cringed in this atmosphere. Through the brightness and cleanliness of wood and metal, the absolute whiteness of the stamped bed-linen and the fresh smell of antiseptics, she had a morbid sense of the ugliness of disease, of the loathsomeness of contact with physical decrepitude that is one of the selfishnesses of the artistic temperament. She felt the dread, incubus-like, pressing upon her and sucking from her what force and vitality she had. A feeling of despair of being able to cope with this thrusting melancholy beset her and she fought it off with her strongest strength.