CHAPTER XXIII
THE TERROR
Graham Stannard made his well-meant but disastrous proposal to Mary at half past five or so on a Friday afternoon. It was a little more than twenty-four hours later, just after dark on Saturday evening, that she came in, unheralded, more incredibly like a vision than ever, upon Anthony March in his secret lair above the grocery.
He was sitting at his work-table scoring a passage in the third act of The Dumb Princess for the wood-wind choir when her knock, faint as it was, breaking in upon the rhythm of his theme, caused his pen to leap away from the paper and his heart to skip a beat. But had it actually been a knock upon his door? Such an event was unlikely enough.
He uttered a tentative and rather incredulous "Come in" as one just awakened speaks, humoring the illusion of a dream.
But the door opened and the Dumb Princess stood there, pallid, wistful, just as she had looked before her true lover climbed the precarious ivy to her tower and tore away the spell that veiled her.
March sat debating with himself,—or so it seemed to him afterward; it was a matter of mere seconds, of course,—why, since she was a vision, did she not look as she had on one of the occasions when he had seen her. The night of the Whitman songs; the blazing afternoon in the hay field.
She was different to-night, and very clearly defined, in a plain little frock of dark blue—yet not quite what one ordinarily meant by dark blue—cut out in an unsoftened square around the neck, and a small hat of straw, the color of the warmer sort of bronze. These austerities of garb, dissociated utterly with all his memories, gave her a poignancy that was almost unbearable. Why had the vision of her come to him like that?
She smiled then and spoke. "It is really I. I've come with a message for you."
Until she spoke he could do nothing but stare as one would at an hallucinatory vision; but her voice, the first articulate syllable of it, brought him to his feet and drew him across the room to where she stood. He was almost suffocated by a sudden convulsion of the heart, half exultation, half terror. The exultation was accountable enough. The high Gods had given him another chance. Why he should be terrified he did not at the time know, but he was—from that very first moment.