“Your tea is ready,” she went on, holding out one of the big, blue teacups that he had sent to her to be refilled for the third time.
He had fallen into a sudden reverie, and seeing that he sat with eyes bent abstractedly on his knife and fork, Stargarde got up and took the cup around the table to him.
When she set it down he glanced up quickly, and was about to ask her pardon, but stopped short, the words arrested on his lips by the expression of her face as she stood looking down at him. At last it was a pleasure to her to minister to him, at last his “bird of free and careless wing” had been caught.
He grew pale, drew his breath hard and fast and laid his hand masterfully over hers.
She started, and drew her fingers from him. Then with her throat suffused with color, and streaks of red across her white cheeks, she walked to the window and gazed out at a drizzling rain that had begun to fall.
Camperdown raised the cup to his lips once or twice without tasting the tea, then set it down, and with a last glance at the straight, lissome back of the disconsolate figure by the window, returned to his patient.
Stargarde glanced over her shoulder in a startled manner when the door closed behind him. “I must get away; I cannot go back with him. Mrs. White,” to the farmer’s wife, who came gliding like a happy ghost to her side, “I cannot wait any longer for the doctor; don’t tell him I’ve gone.”
The woman, hardly conscious of what she was doing in her rapturous state of mind at the prospect of her son’s recovery, wrapped Stargarde’s cloak about her.
“Tell him that I don’t mind the rain and the darkness,” said Stargarde hurriedly. “I need the walk; I will come again to-morrow to see you. I am praying for your boy; good-night,” and with feverish haste she slipped away.
Over the wet and sloppy road she went, sometimes breaking into a run, then walking so slowly that she scarcely seemed to be moving, her tortured face bent on her breast, or lifted inquiringly to the dripping sky above her. The road was almost deserted, but once or twice she shrunk aside to allow belated Negroes to pass her, who were urging on their horses in the direction of their homes in Hammonds Plains.