The simplicity and good taste of the small house, standing in a land of squalid cabins like a disciple of quiet elegance among beggars, had been the result 254 of their collaboration. Glory had had the instinct of artistic perception and true values and he had been able to guide her from his sybarite experience.
The stone fireplace with its ingle-nook, built by their own hands from rocks they had selected and gathered together, seemed to him a beautiful thing. The natural wood of the paneling, picked out at the saw-mill with a critical eye for graining and figuration, satisfied the eye, and the few pictures that he had brought from the East were all landscapes that meant something to each of them—lyric bits of canvas with singing skies. To every object a memory had attached itself; a memory that had also a tendril in their hearts.
But now Glory, too, was looking at all these things as though she as well as himself were leaving them. There was something of farewell in the glance that lingered on them and caressed them, as if of leave-taking and into Spurrier’s heart crept the intuition that despite his declaration just made that this should be their last separation, she was seeing in it a threat of permanence.
And that was the thought that was chilling Glory’s heart and muting the song of happiness which his coming had awakened. This place which had been founded with all the promise of home and companionship was beginning to hold for her the foreboding of loneliness and something like abandonment. He knew it only when they were together here, but she had been in it alone and frightened more than in times of shared happiness.
And why was this true? Why could it be either true or necessary unless, as she had told herself in 255 panic moments and denied so persistently, she was a misfit in his broader life and a woman whom he could enjoy in solitude but dared not trust to comparison with others?
CHAPTER XIX
At last she turned abruptly away, in order that the misery which would no longer submit to concealment might not show itself in her eyes, and stood looking out of the window.
Spurrier crossed with anxious swiftness and took her again into his arms.