“My dear, do you suppose we mind? It is a very great privilege to be allowed to step aside when your work is done.”
“Paul's mother!” Moya insisted.
Mrs. Bogardus rose. “You don't remember your own mother, my dear. You have an exaggerated idea of the—the importance of mothers. They are only a temporary arrangement.” She put out her hands and the girl's cheek touched hers for an instant; then she straightened herself and walked calmly out of the room. Moya remained a little longer, afraid to follow her. “If she would not smile! If she would do anything but smile!”
Paul was walking about his room, half an hour later, when Moya stopped outside his door. She placed the tray on a table in the hall. The door was opened from within. Paul had heard his mother go up before, heard her pause at the stairs, and, after a silence, enter her own room.
“She knows that I know,” he said to himself. “That knowledge will be always between us; we can never look each other in the face again.” To Moya he endeavored to speak lightly.
“It sounded very gay downstairs to-night. You must have had a houseful.”
“I have been with your mother the last hour,” answered Moya, vaguely on the defensive. Since Paul's return there had been little of the old free intercourse in words between them, and without this outlet their mutual consciousness became acute. Often as they saw each other during the day, the keenest emotion attached to the first meeting of their eyes.
Paul was unnerved by his sudden recall from death to life. Its contrasts were overwhelming to his starved senses: from the dirt and dearth and grimy despair of his burial hutch in the snow to this softly lighted, close-curtained room, warm and sweet with flowers; from the gaunt, unshaven spectre of the packer and his ghostly revelations, to Moya, meekly beautiful, her bright eyes lowered as she trailed her soft skirts across the carpet; Moya seated opposite, silent, conscious of him in every look and movement. Her lovely hands lay in her lap, and the thought of holding them in his made him tremble; and when he recalled the last time he had kissed her he grew faint. He longed to throw off this exhausting self-restraint, but feared to betray his helpless passion which he deemed an insult to his soul's worship of her.
And she was thinking: “Is this all it is going to mean—his coming home—our being together? And I was almost his wife!”
“So it was my mother you were talking to in the study? I thought I heard a man's voice.”