And all I have to do is to betray this garish resolution and my secret will be out, and all that I am and have done will stand forth as naked pretense and I shall appear stripped and manacled like a common criminal too good for the hangman.
And I have dared to judge Pendleton!
The time-honored remedy in fiction, when a man finds himself in love with any one he has no business to love is, I believe, to go away, to travel. How ridiculous that sounds to me. The only place I can go to is Visconti's. To Visconti's! And now I have come back from Visconti's and I cannot stay in the house.
I cannot stay in the house because Alicia is in it—and Pendleton!
Oh, he will have his way, I am sure! The Old Man of the Sea infallibly has. Why should the unscrupulous always have the advantage? I abhor to think of him.
It is Alicia that is filling my mind, my heart, my life. I have been trying to think of her even until yesterday as a child, and I know I have been deceitful. She is a woman—she is womanhood. I see her now in her radiance and every movement and gesture of her, every act, every glance speaks of the freshness and youth of life, of a supreme, a divine beauty. I have called her a child and I yearn to sink at her knees and cry out my anguish and my adoration. I am the child, helpless before her. Whatever I conceal, I cannot conceal what her going would do to me. It would shatter what remains of my life. And I suffered Pendleton yesterday to propose calmly that she go over to him—trafficking in Alicia!—and with Pendleton! It is stifling to think of. I must go out. But I cannot let any of them see me. I feel like a thief in my own house. The window—ah, I can slip out for at least a solitary hour under the stars!
I did not manage to get out under the stars after all. Just as I began to fumble with the screen Alicia asked leave to come in. No presence could have been more welcome to me, but the dark thoughts under which I had been brooding made me wince with pain as she entered. Nevertheless I contrived to greet her with almost normal cheerfulness.
"Uncle Ranny," she began hurriedly in an undertone, coming close to me, "is it really coming, then?"
"What do you mean, my dear?" I asked her, though such subterfuges are quite useless with Alicia.
"Oh, he's just been telling me that he has his eye on a flat near Columbia University in New York—that he expects to have it going by the time the schools open—hasn't he told you?"