She looked about for other means of escape; but she knew immediately that there was none. Her own bedroom opened off the room in which she was now trapped; but it was a mere cubby-hole without an outer door or even a window. On the other side of the room there was a window looking out toward the desert; but even as her glance sought relief in that direction she remembered that this window, of only half-sash dimensions, was nailed into its place and was immovable. Against the dusty panes a bird-cage hung, and she realized with an oddly ill-timed pang of sorrow that it was empty. It was plain that the canary had died during her absence; and she wondered if anything in all the world could seem so empty as a bird-cage which had once had an occupant and had lost it. The sunset sky beyond that empty cage and the uncleaned window-panes caught her glance: an infinitely far-off drift of saffron with never a moving figure between it and the window through which she looked.
Then all her terrors were renewed by Fectnor’s voice. He had sauntered to a small table near the middle of the room and sat down on the end of it, after shoving a chair in Sylvia’s direction.
“What’s the matter with you, Sylvia?” he demanded. He scarcely seemed angry: impatient would be the word, perhaps.
Something in his manner, rather than his words, wiped out that chasm of time that had been placed between them. It was as if she had talked with him yesterday. She felt hideously familiar with him—on the same mental and moral plane with him.
“I am married,” she said shortly. If she had thought she would resort to parleying and evasions, she now had no intention of doing so. It seemed inevitable that she should talk to Fectnor in his own language.
“I don’t care anything about your marriage,” he said. “A bit of church flummery. Use your brains, Sylvia. You know that couldn’t make any difference.”
“I’m not thinking about the flummery. That isn’t it. It’s the fact that I love the man I married.”
“All very well and good. But you know you used to love me.”
“No, I never did.”
“Oh, yes you did. You just forget. At any rate, you was as much to me as you could ever be to a husband. You know you can’t drop me just because it’s convenient for you to take up with somebody else. You know that’s not the way I’m built.”