What, then, had awakened her so far in advance of the customary hour?
Something hideous and hateful skulking like a torpid snake in the shadows beyond the threshold of consciousness, some foul shape that she instinctively shrank from calling up....
The bedside clock struck nine, and Lucinda started up in a flutter excited by the thought that she would yet another time be late and so afford fresh reason for dissension with her director ... then sank back to her pillow, cringing from memories that came trooping in the wake of the reminder that she was to know no more of Barry Nolan in her life....
No more of Nolan, no more of Nelly, no more of Lynn ... no more of Love....
With a convulsive movement she flung over in the bed and lay almost prone, her face snuggled into bare arms whose pure lustre lent fire to the crimson that glowed in a lunette of cheek, the one ear visible, even in her neck's sleek loveliness.
Things that Nelly had told her, resting on that very bed, plain tales of the life that Lynn by preference had led, related in the flat and toneless accents of emotional prostration, therefore the more likely to be free from overstatement; things Lynn himself had owned inadvertently or injudiciously at the urge of vanity craving greater prestige in her sight; things that she knew of her own experience with the man, little circumstances of their association that had threatened its harmony, things she hadn't liked and wilfully had been blind to, denied, or disbelieved: all swam up from the deeps of memory to float like scum upon the surface of her consciousness.
Lonely and restless, starving for affection and all too eager to snatch at shadow and proclaim it substance, self-dedicated victim of a ready-made infatuation....
And she had called that Love!
What dishonor, what humiliation, what reproach!
What an escape! and at what cost!... a cost not yet all paid, and which if she would she might not pay alone, but must see others pay in part for her, Nelly and Lynn perhaps with their lives, Bel too in his way, in another way Zinn ... all called upon to lay down things they held dear that she might have her lesson, that she might learn Love is never lightly to be won, no, nor put by, either....