Harry made some incoherent reply. He was desperately anxious to get away—his thought was a snarl of tatters, threaded by one lucid purpose: to spare her coming self-abasement this sardonic humiliation. He did not think of a time in the future, when her error must naturally disclose itself. The tangle spelled Now. Not to tell her—not to let her know!
He almost ran from the room and down the stair.
CHAPTER VIII "AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?"
At the foot of the landing he paused, drawing a deep breath as if to lift a weight of air. He needed to get his bearings—to win back a measure of calmness.
As he stood there, Hugh came from the library. His head was down and he went furtively and slinkingly, as though dreading even a casual regard. He snatched his hat from the rack, passed out of the house, and was swallowed up in the dusk. David Stires had followed his son into the hall. He answered the gloomy question in Harry's eyes:
"He is gone," he said, "and I hope to Heaven I may never see his face again!" Then, slowly and feebly, he ascended the stair.
The library windows were shadowed by shrubbery, and the sunset splintered against the wall in a broad stripe, like cloth of crimson silk. Harry leaned his hot forehead against the chill marble of the mantelpiece and gazed frowningly at the dark Korean desk—an antique gift of his own to David Stires—where the slip of paper still lay that had spelled such ruin and shame. From the rear of the house came the pert, tittering laugh of a maid bantering an expressman, and the heavy, rattling thump of rolled trunks. There was something ghastly in the incomprehension of all the house save the four chief actors of the melodrama. The travesty was over, the curtain rung down to clapping of hands, the scene-shifters clearing away—and behind all, in the wings, unseen by any spectator, the last act of a living tragedy was rushing to completion.
Ten, fifteen minutes passed, and old David Stires reëntered the room, went feebly to his wheel-chair, and sat down. He sat a moment in silence, looking at a portrait of Jessica—a painting by Altsheler that hung above the mantel—in a light fleecy gown, with one white rose in the bronze hair. When he spoke the body's infirmity had become all at once pitifully apparent. The fiery wrath seemed suddenly to have burned itself out, leaving only dead ashes behind. His eyes had shrunk away into almost empty sockets. The authority had faded from his face. He was all at once a feeble, gentle-looking, ill, old man, with white mustaches and uncertain hands, dressed in ceremonial broadcloth.