“* * Drennen place. That’s where she is. I’ll find her! Let me go! Quick, take this off my head! I tell you, I’ve got to go! * * * Oh, my dear, don’t you want to see me? You look like an autumn leaf in that scarlet cloak. Come closer to me. Your hair is like flame and you’re pale—pale—pale! Look at me! * * * How dare you treat me this way? How dare you! You knew I’d come to you—you knew I couldn’t help it. Some one told me you didn’t want me to come. * * * It was a letter, wasn’t it? Some one wrote me a letter. But it was a lie!”
Lois readjusted the ice-pack, and the voice died down into broken mutterings. Then he began again:
“Where’s Richard Daunt? You’ve got to make her understand! You’ve got to, and you can’t. You’ve failed. She used to love you, and now she’s gone away and left you. She won’t come back! You can go to the devil! * * * Ardee! See how your hair shines against the old cross! Pray for her soul! Pray—for—her—soul! * * Ardee!”
Margaret bowed her face on her hands, still clasping the bed-rail. Great, clear tears welled up in her eyes and splashed upon the coverlid. She saw, as if through a fleering maze of windy rain-sheets, the dull, round, staring eyes, the yellow skin, the restless fingers and unlovely lips. Then she stood upright, swaying back and putting both hands to her temples as though something tense had snapped in her brain.
A pained wonder was in the look she turned on Lois—something the look of a furred wood-animal caught by the thudding twinge of a bullet. The next moment she threw herself softly on her knees by the cot, stretching her arms across the straightened figure, pressing her lips to the rounded outline of the knees, and between these kisses, lifting her face, swollen with sobless crying, to gaze at the rolling, unrecognizing features beside her. Agony was in the puffed hollows beneath her eyes, and her lips were drawn with the terrible yearning of a mother for her ailing child.
Lois raised her forcefully, yet feeling a strange powerlessness, and drew her away, with a finger on her lip and a warning glance beyond the screens, and Margaret followed her with the tranced gaze of a sleep-walker. There was no repugnance or distrust in it now, or fleshly horror of sickness.
In her room again, she stood before the window, her mind reaching out for the new sweetness that had dropped around her. All that she had thought strongest in her old love had shrunk to pitiful detail. Between her young, lithe body and the broken and ravaged wreck she had seen, there could then be no bond of bounding blood and throbbing flesh; but love, masterful, undismayed, had cried for its own. Something was dissolving within her heart—something breaking down and away of its own weight. She felt the fight finished. It had not been fought out, but the combatants who had gripped throat in the darkness had started back in the new dawn, to behold themselves brothers. There was a primal directness in the blow that had thrust her back—somewhere—back from all self-questionings and the torture of mental misunderstanding, upon herself. It was an appeal to Cæsar. Beneath the decree, the rigidity of belief that had lain back of her determination turned suddenly flexible. She did not try to reason—she felt. But this feeling was ultimate, final. She knew that she could never doubt herself again.
The green glints from the grass-plots on the tree-lined street and the sun on the gray asphalt filled her with a warm tenderness. Every bird in all the world was piping full-throated; every spray on every bush was hung with lush blossoms and drenched with fragrance. The swell of filling lungs and tumultuous blood—the ecstasy of breathing had returned to her. The joy-bitter gladness of the heart and the world, the enfolding arms of the unforgot, clasped her round. It was for her the Soul’s renaissance. The Great Illumination had come!
As Lois gazed at her, mystified, she turned, with both hands pressed against her breast, and laughed.