She crossed the room to the gallery, where she glanced swiftly about. “You must leave, and I’ll go down to supper. Next Sunday I am going to walk ... in the morning.”
“If you go out by the priest’s,” he suggested, “and turn to the right, you will find a pretty stream; further down there’s an old mill.”
She drew back, waiting for him to descend to the ground below.
Simmons’ clerk was standing on the platform before the store, and Gordon drew up. “How’s Buckley?” he inquired.
“Bad,” the other answered laconically. “They sent to Stenton for help. His head’s cracked. It’s funny,” he commented, “with a hundred people around nobody saw that stone thrown ’tall.”
“It don’t do sometimes to see this and that,” Gordon explained, tightening the reins.
He unhitched the horse in his shedlike stable by the aid of a hand lantern. He was reluctant to go into the house, and he prolonged the unbuckling of the familiar straps, the measuring of feed, beyond all necessity. Outside, he thought he heard General Jackson by the stream, and he stood whistling softly, but only the first notes of the whippoorwills responded. “The night’s just come down all at once,” he said. Finally, with a rigid assumption of indifference covering an uneasy heart, he went in.
Lettice was asleep by the lamp in the sitting room. She looked younger than ever, but there were shadows under her eyes, her mouth was a little drawn as if by the memory of pain. A shawl, he saw, had slipped from her shoulders, and he walked clumsily on the tips of his shoes and rearranged it. Then he sat down and waited for her to wake.
The flame of the lamp was like a section of an orange; it cast a warm, low radiance through the room. His gaze rested on the photograph of Lettice’s mother in her coffin. He imagined that paper effigy of inanimate clay moved, turned its dull head to regard him. “I’m getting old,” he told himself contemptuously, repressing an involuntary start of surprise. His heart rested like a lump of lead in his breast; it oppressed him so that his breathing grew labored. His mind returned to Meta Beggs: coldness like hers was not natural, it was not right. He thought again, as men have vainly of such women since the dawning of consciousness, that it would be stirring to fire her indifference, to ignite a passion in response to his own desire. The memory of her slender, full body, her cool lips, tormented him.
Lettice woke abruptly.