“Come! come! The sun is setting; it was too wonderful, I couldn’t bear it alone.” His eyes held hers.
“I saw Miss Mary driving away.”
“Yes, she has gone to Tarasp to visit an old patient; she will be away until tomorrow afternoon.”
A shadow fell; it was twilight.
“You must go now.”
He tried to hold her; she slipped out of his arms, shutting the long windows after her. He went back to his room. Those fleeting moments made him eager, desperate. The night was coming on; they were alone together at the end of the world.
Miss Mary sitting in the train was troubled. She opened a telegram and read it again, “Meet me at Tarasp. Say nothing to my wife. Floyd Garrison.”
20
The little parlor of the hotel was filled with guests, assembled there, as was the custom, waiting for the dining-room doors to be opened. Martin, standing in the hall, a living symbol of electric force, created a sensation. He drew nearer and took in the crowd of pale women, young, nervous, with mysterious ills they could not, or would not, explain to their doctor, who, for the lack of a suitable name, called the sickness “anæmia.” He looked them over with an experienced man’s compelling eyes. Some were very good-looking, would have been beautiful under favorable conditions, but they were pale, with white lips and drawn features, like plants in a dark cellar pining for the sun. He became amusedly conscious of being the only man; he finally espied in the garden a rheumatic old fellow, like the decayed trunk of a tree. He felt a battery of admiring glances leveled at him. He smiled, went to the foot of the staircase, waited for Julie.