“I know you would,” shouted Otto, breaking loose, glad of the pretext. “I know you would, you spendthrift! Spendthrift and profligate, you would do anything—for pleasure.”
His eye flashed from one to the other, and Ursula read the flash.
She remained standing quite still, her hand on the baby’s coverlet. Gerard shrugged his shoulders. “My dear fellow, don’t be so angry. I shall sell nothing,” he said, and walked into the adjoining room. Otto, already ashamed of himself, went out by the passage-door.
The baby was fast asleep, breathing heavily. Ursula remained standing still.
The room was very silent. Presently a quick spasm of trembling shook her, and with a frightened glance to right and left, she hurried away down the vestibule, out into the wintry morning.
She ran swiftly along the avenue and turned into the high road, taking the longest route to the village because it had lain straight in front of her. The gaunt ice-rimmed trees in the pallid air swam round about her through a mist of her own creating; the desolate plain, stretching white and cold, seemed to mock her with its snow-bound loneliness. She shuddered as she ran.
Near the turnpike she stopped. She would meet a human being there, the turnpike man. He would touch his cap. Not that. She shrank back.
And in the pause she asked herself where she was going. To her father, of course, home to her father’s consistent love—the one thing in this world she could forever rely on. Home, to the old home, to weep out her agony upon one faithful breast.
And even as she pictured to herself for a moment what she would do when she reached the comfort of that embrace, she felt that she could not do it. There are valleys of the shadow through which a true-hearted woman must take her way alone.