He smiled.
“I’ve just pulled through; and yet it’s strange, isn’t it, the fever that possesses me to go back! The lure is on me. It draws men back, I suppose, to their doom!”
“It does—my husband is going again.”
“So they told me in New York. I was there a few hours. Of course the newspapers besieged me, and I heard that much. Then I escaped. That’s why I didn’t hear of—of your marriage.”
He was unable to maintain his tone, and his voice broke on the word. She winced.
“It was a quiet wedding; not much was said about it. My father has been ill.”
He expressed his regret, and asked for the latest news of the judge’s health. She colored deeply.
“We haven’t written. It was agreed, when Arthur and I came up here, that no one should write to us. You see, he’s been so much pursued about everything! I’ve been shut up here, out of the world, and I know nothing.”
He turned quickly, and their eyes met with a shock of feeling. She knew intuitively that there was a reason why she had been kept in the dark, and that he fathomed it and was indignant for her.
Once, when Overton was a lad, he had thrashed a comrade for maltreating a lame dog. She had seen him do it, and she remembered the look in his eyes. She saw the same look now, flaming up in tranquil depths like a torch in the dusk.