The Invader: A Novel

by Margaret L. Woods

"Married!" she whispered to herself. "How perfectly awful!"

A fiery wave of anger that was almost hate swept through her veins, anger against the unknown husband and against that other one who had the power thus to dispose of her destiny, while she lay helpless in some unfathomed deep between life and death. Swifter than light her thoughts flew back to the last hours of consciousness which had preceded that strange and terrible engulfment of her being. She remembered that Mr. Stewart had tried to propose to her on the river and that she had not allowed him to do so. Probably he had taken this as a refusal. She knew nothing of any love of Milly's for him; only was sure that he had not been in love with her, Mildred, when she first knew him; therefore had not cared for her other personality. Who else was possible? With an audible cry she sprang to her feet.

"Toovey! Archibald Toovey!"

The idea was monstrous, it was also grotesque; and even while she plunged despairing fingers in her hair, she laughed so loud that she might have been heard in the corridor.

"Mrs. Archibald Toovey! Good Heavens! But that girl was perfectly capable of it."

Then she became more than serious and buried her face in her hands, thinking.

"If it is Mr. Toovey," she thought, "I must go away at once, wherever I am. I can't have been married long. I am sure to have some money somewhere. I'll go to Tims. Oh, that brute! That idiot!"—she was thinking of Milly—"How I should like to strangle her!"

She clinched her hands till the nails hurt her palms. Two photographs, propped up on the top of a chest of drawers, caught her eye. She snatched them. One was a wedding group, but there was no bridegroom; only six bridesmaids. It was as bad as such things always are, and it was evident that the dresses were ill-fitting, the hats absurd. Tims was prominent among the bridesmaids, looking particularly ugly. The other photograph might have seemed pretty to a less prejudiced eye. It was that of a slight, innocent-looking girl in a white satin gown, "ungirt from throat to hem," and holding a sheaf of lilies in her hand. Her hair was loose upon her shoulders, crowned with a fragile garland and covered with a veil of fine lace.

"What a Judy!" commented Mildred, throwing the photograph fiercely away from her. "Fancy my being married in a dressing-gown and having Tims for a bridesmaid! Sickening!"

But her anxiety with regard to the bridegroom dominated even this just indignation. Somehow, after seeing the photographs, she was convinced he must be Archibald Toovey. She determined to fly at once. The question was, where was she? Not in England, she fancied. The stove had been thrice-heated by the benevolent cherry-cheeked one, and the atmosphere of the room was stifling. This, together with the cold outside, had combined to throw a gray veil across the window-panes. She hastily put on a blue Pyrenean wool dressing-gown, flung open a casement and leaned out into the wide sunshine, the iced-champagne air. The window was only on the first floor, and she saw just beneath a narrow, snowy strip of ground, on either side and below it snow-sprinkled pinewoods falling, falling steeply, as it were, into space. But far below the blue air deepened into a sapphire that must be a lake, and beyond that gray cliffs, remote yet fairly clear in the sunshine, rose streaked with the blue shadows of their own buttresses. Above the cliffs, white and sharp and fantastic in their outline, snowy mountain summits showed clear against the deep blue sky. Between them, imperceptibly moving on its secular way, hung the glacier, a track of vivid ultramarine and green, looking like a giant pathway to the stars. Mildred guessed she was in Switzerland. She knew that it should be easy to get back to England, yet for her with her peculiar inexperience of life, it would not be easy. At any rate, she would dash herself down some gray-precipice into that lake below rather than remain here as the bride of Archibald Toovey. Just as she was registering a desperate vow to that effect a man came climbing up the woodland way to the left, a long-legged man in a knickerbocker suit and gaiters. He stepped briskly out of the pinewood on to the snowy platform below, and seeing her at the window, looked up, smiling, and waved his cap, with a cry of "Hullo, Milly!" And it was not Archibald Toovey.