“Oh, if you feel like that—if you still feel so, I entreat you——” she stretched out her clasped hands toward him in a gesture of supplication—“I beg of you to tell me the truth! I can’t bear it any longer. I’ve tried not to speak, but I can’t help it—I must! Tell me the truth—what is this thing? What happened? Who deserted you?”
He averted his face, but she was aware of the struggle in his mind. He spoke at last with an effort.
“I can’t—I mustn’t! What there is to tell, Faunce must tell you himself. Say to him that I have been here and I want to see him. He may want to come to me—tell him that I’ll wait until he does come. He’ll understand that!”
She did not speak again, but stood looking at him, the color slowly leaving her face. She held herself very erect, with her head up, as if she saw a battle before her and would not give it up.
It was a moment so pregnant with feeling, so tragic in discovery, that neither of them could bridge it with mere words. Overton did not even take her hand, but turned with a mute gesture of farewell and walked slowly out of the room and out of the house, his head bent and his shoulders bowed, like a man who carried a burden.
XXI
It was late in the evening, long past their usual dinner-hour, when Diane heard Faunce coming up the path to the front door. Ever since that bitter moment with Overton, she had been trying to steady her mind for this meeting. It seemed to her that she must be ready for it—ready to force the climax, to make Faunce tell her the truth.
If she had failed to get the whole story from Overton, his very silence and his omissions had made it easy for her imagination to fill up the gaps. She shuddered now before the vision that her tortured mind had conjured from the frozen silence. What had happened behind the gray curtain of the mist and snow? What deep and tragic drama had been enacted? She did not know, yet she shuddered. She felt the weight of it upon her. The shadow of it lay across her path, between her and her husband.
She sat alone before the big fireplace, almost in the very spot where Overton had stood, and listened. She could not move, she could not even go to open the door. She was listening to the step—a little hurried and uncertain—that came up the steps and across the porch, and halted at the door. There was a moment’s pause, and then Faunce thrust his latch-key into the lock. She dragged herself to her feet and stood facing the door, incapable of action or speech.
He came in very pale and haggard, but his preoccupation had gained upon him, and he was not even startled to see his wife standing there, motionless, before the fire. He saw her, saw the long, graceful lines of her figure, the small, uplifted head; but he was too much absorbed in the struggle within to recognize the change in her.