“Will you be home early this afternoon?” Leila bent to rearrange the daffodils in a low glass bowl as she spoke, and her face was averted from him. “Early enough for your golf, I mean?”
“No, I shan’t be out here until late. Don’t wait dinner for me.” A swift thought came to him, and he added deliberately: “There is to be a special meeting at the club in town; I’ll try to catch the midnight train, but in the event that I decide to stay over, I’ll ’phone, of course.”
She followed him out upon the veranda for his customary farewell kiss, but to his relief he spied a familiar runabout halting at the gate and escaped from her with a wave of his hand.
“There’s Millard! I’ll ride down with him. Good-bye.”
Millard was a golf enthusiast, and his detailed description of the previous day’s game lasted throughout the interval at the station, but it fell upon deaf ears.
Storm’s thoughts were in a turmoil. At one moment he felt that he could no longer endure the strain of the attitude he had assumed; that he must stop the train, rush back to his wife and demand from her the truth. At the next, his pride once more came uppermost; his pride, and the underlying doubt that his worst suspicions were actually founded on fact, which made him fear to render himself ridiculous in her eyes. It was true that she had lied about her presence in the city on the previous day, but she had gone openly to an office building at broad noon and left it alone. She had received a letter from someone in that building which she tried to keep from his observation, but her expression when she picked it up, although furtive, had not been guilty; rather, it had been full of pleased expectancy, as quickly masked. That visit, that letter might be simply explained, but the telephone call which he had overheard, the errand that had caused her, his wife, to steal from her house at midnight like a thief——!
There could be no other construction than the obvious one! He recalled her cool, unruffled assurance at the breakfast table, her charming air of solicitude at his own haggard appearance, and his blood boiled with rage. Did she think to deceive him, to keep him indefinitely in the state of fatuous complacency in which he had pitied other husbands? Was he to be spoken of, for instance, as George Holworthy had spoken of Dick Brewster the night before?
With the thought Storm glanced about him at his neighbors in the club car. If what he suspected were true, did any of them know already? Were any of them pitying him with that careless, half-contemptuous pity reserved for the deceived? He detected no sign of it, but the idea was like a knife turned in a wound, and he hurried from them as soon as the train drew in to the city station.
There he found himself mechanically making his way toward the Leicester Building, with no very clear impression of what he meant to do on arrival. Among its myriad offices, representing scores of varied financial and commercial activities, he could scarcely hope to obtain a clue to the purpose of his wife’s visit; and yet the place drew him like a magnet.
Within the entrance he halted before the huge directory board with its rows of names alphabetically arranged; halted, and then stood as though transfixed. Midway down the first column a single name had leaped out to him, and its staring letters of white upon the black background seemed to dance mockingly before his vision.