“Did—did he speak of me, Dan?” she asked in a low voice.
Daniel swallowed the lump in his throat. “I—I don’t know—I didn’t see the letter.”
She drew back, blushing as quickly as she had paled. With an odd little groping gesture she put up her hand and pulled at the pink bow under her chin. Then she laughed, and the sound of her laughter hurt him like a blow.
“I’m keeping you,” she said lightly. “Give my love to your mother. I’m sorry you won’t come with me. Drive on, Lucas.”
Daniel stood back, bare-headed, following her with his eyes, his heart in a tumult. He felt as if he had struck her, and yet he had not told her the worst.
As the old horses started, Virginia remembered him. She looked back and waved her hand.
“Goodbye!” she called to him, and, after a moment: “Good luck!”
Daniel stood gazing after her. He found himself, for the moment, unable to move. He watched until the old wagonette, with that slim young figure so erect at the side of it, vanished in a cloud of dust in the distance. It seemed to him that his heart stood still, too, within him. For the first time in his life he felt helpless, he felt physically as if he had been beaten. Why had he been forced to do it? Why, he stormed inwardly, was it his lot to give her the first warning? How she would hate him! Hereafter he would be in the same class with William, she would despise the whole family. He stood there shuddering, and he might have remained there a long time if old Mrs. Payson had not driven past in her new motor-car and shrilled to him that it was a “fine morning,” and she had seen something—he didn’t catch what it was—in the morning paper.
It roused him, he straightened himself and walked on, as fast as his limp permitted.
Judge Jessup was already at his desk when Daniel opened the door. He growled a greeting, sorting his mail. The judge had a high Roman nose and the kind of chin we associate with Benjamin Franklin. Owing to a formidable growth of eyebrow, his expression was sometimes abnormally fierce. But this morning there was a gleam of triumph in his eye.