Was he trying to show her how mean he could be? she thought, as with a heartache, and a confused sense of wrong and distress, she slowly went upon her way. Of course that parting was just bravado, of course he felt more than that! She resented it—she thought he had been unnecessarily unkind——
But her spirits slowly settled themselves. Wolf knew what she felt, now, and they had really parted without bitterness. A pleasant sense of being her own mistress crept over her, her cheeks cooled, her fluttering heart came back to its normal beat. She began to hear herself telling Chris how courageous she had been.
It was too bad—it was one of the sad things of life. But after all, love was love, in spite of Wolf's scepticism, and if it soothed Wolf to be rude, let him have that consolation! What did a little pain more or less signify now? There was no going back. Years from now Wolf would forgive her, recognizing that great love was its own excuse for being. "And if this sort of thing exists only to be crushed and killed," Norma wrote Chris a few days later, "then half the great pictures, the great novels, the great poems and dramas, the great operas, are lies. But you and I know that they are not lies!"
She was unhappy at home, for Aunt Kate was grave and silent, Rose wrapped in the all-absorbing question of the tiny Catherine's meals, and Wolf neither came nor wrote on Saturday night. But in Chris's devotion she was feverishly and breathlessly happy, their meetings—always in public places, and without a visible evidence of their emotion—were hours of the most stimulating delight.
CHAPTER XXX
So matters went on for another ten days. Then suddenly, on a mid-week afternoon, Norma, walking home from a luncheon in a wild and stormy wind, was amazed to see the familiar, low-slung roadster waiting outside her aunt's door when she reached the steps. Chris jumped out and came to meet her as she looked bewilderedly toward it, a Chris curiously different in manner from the man she had left only an hour ago.
"Norma!" he said, quickly, "I found a message when I got to the office. I was to call up Aunt Marianna's house at once. She's ill—very ill. They want me, and they want you!"
"Me?" she echoed, blankly. "What for?"