“The doctor’s so full of crotchets! I suppose he and papa have been quarreling again. They always do.”
Faunce, to whom Dr. Gerry’s look had conveyed a very different meaning, made no immediate reply. Instead, he followed Diane into the drawing-room, and waited there while she went to carry out the doctor’s instructions and administer a dose of medicine to the querulous patient.
Faunce moved over to the long French window and stood looking out, aware of the judge’s voice in the distance, before Diane shut the door between. In a long vista between the hedgerows he saw the doctor’s sturdy figure trudging toward the automobile that he had left at the end of the lane.
He recalled the night, now nearly two months ago, when they had walked home together, and he had admitted his insomnia. Since then he had more or less avoided the older man. Gerry had been so quick to divine his use of drugs that he dreaded a more searching scrutiny, which might fathom yet another recess of his inner mind, or surprise some secret that he was still determined to hide.
Yet, as he stood there alone in the warm and fragrant room—a room that seemed to express so much of Diane’s rich personality, her refinement and taste and spirit—he recalled Dr. Gerry’s words:
“You’ve got something on your mind, and you won’t be any better, you won’t sleep any sounder, until you get it off.”
A sudden impulse gripped him, a potent longing to rush out of the house, bareheaded as he was, and, pursuing the older man down the lane, to pour out the misery that was destroying his soul. It seemed to him that the relief would be more than commensurate with the humiliation; that the very sound of his own voice unfolding his terrible story would break the dread spell, release his spirit from thraldom, and expel the specter that haunted his brain.
The impulse had come to him before, but never with such compelling force as now—perhaps because there had never been so much reason for him to pause, to halt on the road he was following, before it was too late.
VIII
But even while the feeling—keen in itself, and searching—was passing through his mind, Arthur Faunce knew that he would not yield to it—not now. He could not, for he was moved by a greater and more compelling force—his passion for Diane Herford. Between that and his peace of mind, or something which he thought might help restore his peace of mind, he felt himself unable to choose.