But as the weeks dragged themselves by he had come to know, with a kind slowness of realization, that this hope must die. In their late talks, both of them had tacitly recognized this. In the night of his growing despair, she had been his one star. Now he must shut out that ray with his own hands and turn his face to the intolerable dark.
When her head had been next his on the pillow, with his nostrils full of the clean, grassy fragrance of her hair—when her hand had closed his lips and her voice had plead with him, he had seen, as through a lightning-rift, the enormity of the selfishness with which he had let his soul be tempted. From that moment there was for him but one way—this way. And he had accepted it unflinchingly, heroically.
The spring of the wide stairway broke and turned half way up, and from where he sat his eye sighted the landing and that slim figure coming slowly down. It was the old Margaret in street dress. Above the fur of her close, fawn cloth coat, her hopeless eyes looked over the balustrade along which her slight, gloved hand slid weakly, as though seeking support for her limbs.
She crossed the threshold and came toward him, with her eyes half closed, as though in a maze of grief. The hollows beneath them looked bruised, and her features pinched like a child’s with the cold. Gropingly and blindly, one hand reached out to him, the other she pressed close to her throat. She was bathed in a wave of violent trembling.
Every stretching fibre in Daunt’s being responded. He could feel the shuddering palpitation through her suède glove. His self-restraint hung about him like heavy chains, which the quiver of an eyelash, the impulse of a sigh, would start into clamorous vibration.
He looked up and their eyes met once. Her gaze clung to him. His lips formed, rather than spoke, the word “Good-by.” Then he put her hand aside and turned his head from her, not to see her go.
His strained ear heard her uncertain footfalls, and the agony of his mind counted them! Now she was by the table. Now her hand was on the knob. Now—— He sprang around, facing her at the sound of a stumble and a dulled blow; she had pitched forward against the opened door, swaying—about to fall.
As her knees touched the floor, a scream burst shrill in the silence of the room—a scream that pierced the drowsy quiet of the sun-parlor and brought the doctor running through the hall.
“Margaret!”