She slipped down upon the bare floor and crouched there shuddering and agonized, her disheveled hair wet with her tears. Was her love to be but the thing of an hour, a single clasp—and then, forever, nothing? His father’s deed was not his fault. Yet how could she love a man whose every feature brought a pang to that mother she loved more than herself? So, over and over, the wheel of her thought turned in the same desolate groove, and over and over the paroxysms of grief and longing submerged her.
Dawn was paling the guttering candle and streaking the sky outside before she composed herself. She rose heavily, as white as a narcissus flower, winding back her hair from her quivering face, and struggling to repress the tearless sobs that still caught stranglingly at her breath. The gray infiltrating light seemed gaunt and cruel, and the thin cheeping of waking sparrows on the lawn came to her with a haunting intolerable note of pain.
Noiselessly as she had descended, she crept again up the stair. As she passed her mother’s door, she paused a moment, and laying her arms out across it, pressed her lips to the dark grain of the wood.
CHAPTER XL
THE AWAKENING
The sun had passed the meridian next day when Valiant awoke, from a sleep as deep as Abou ben Adhem’s, yet one crowded with flying tiptoe dreams. Inchoate and of such flimsy material that the first whiff of reality dissipated them like smoke, these nevertheless left behind them a fragrance, a sensation of golden sweetness and delight. The one great fact of Shirley’s love had lain at the core of all these honied images, and his mind was full of it as his eyes opened, wide all at once, to the new day.
He looked at his watch and rolled from the bed with a laugh. “Past twelve!” he exclaimed. “Good heavens! What about all the work I had laid out for to-day?”
He went down the stair in his bath-robe. The walls were still wreath-hung, but the rooms had been despoiled of their roses: only a dozen vases of blooms still unwithered remained of the greater glory; and in the yellow parlor—a great heap of shriveled petals, broken ivy and dewy-blue cedar berries, sprinkled with wisps of feathers and sequinned beads—lay the shattered remainders of last night’s gaiety.