I looked at the girl on the bed. She was asleep, but her respiration was rapid; she was breathing for two. "What if—"
I dared scarcely formulate my thought. Was he her husband? Did merely the spoken word make Gordon Ewart and my mother, man and wife? What was it Cale said: she had pleaded so with his mother not to be with her husband that first night of her marriage. And there was no second.
I began to see differently, as Cale predicted. Horror, shame, humiliation, despair, jealousy of my own mother—all this that obstructed vision, deflected, distorted it, was being cleared away.
Had Mr. Ewart come to look at this matter in the same light, that he had never been my mother's husband? That words, alone, could never make him that?
"You are doing him a bitterer wrong than your mother before you." Perhaps Cale was right.
"Why was he silent?" I asked myself, and found the answer: he could not have gained my love, had I known. And he wanted my love—wanted me, and me alone of all the world for his mate. But how could he, knowing?
I lost myself in conjecture, but I began to see clearly, differently. My own act, my desertion of him, after what he had mutely promised, was becoming a base thing in my eyes.
I asked Delia Beaseley once, if she had heard any word from Mr. Ewart.
"No, not a word," she said decidedly, "and remembering how he looked when he braced up and walked into this very basement twenty-seven years ago, I don't expect to hear from him. I ain't judgin' you, my dear, but you 've done an awful thing."
"And what of his act?"