“Good-by. There is something I was going to say, but it has gone from me. I’ll see you to-morrow and be more like myself,” Rex said; and with another smile Irene walked rapidly up the lane while Rex took his way more slowly toward the McPherson Place.
CHAPTER XIV
REX AND COLIN
To say that he was a good deal upset would not fully describe Rex’s condition when he reached home and, declining lunch on the plea of a headache, went to his room. His head was aching with that wavy, trembling feeling, hard to combat, and every nerve was quivering with excitement.
“Let me rest a bit and get cool and I shall be able to think clearly, and know it was only a hallucination of my disordered brain,” he thought, as he dashed the cold water over his face and head till his hair was dripping wet. “It was exactly that way with poor Nannie,” he continued, as he tried to dry his hair and face. “She was thinking so much of Sandy and so afraid she should see him that she thought she did, while I—well, I wasn’t thinking of Irene, but of the ridiculous thing I was doing to please a girl and what Tom would say if he knew it. I was not expecting to see her, but I did; or something very like half of her, even the little fancy comb stuck on one side of her hair was plain. I could not be mistaken.”
How did it happen and was it an hallucination, or was it a device of the devil? he asked himself, half wishing it were the latter, for then he would not feel obliged to follow his suggestion. Then he called himself a brute for thinking for a moment of the devil in connection with Irene, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. “It rhymes, don’t it?” he said, with a laugh, repeating Irene and seen and wondering if he were not getting a little off in his head. How he wished Tom was there to help him. “I’d make a clean breast of the whole business from the will to the well. I wish I had done it before,” he said; but Tom was sweating in his office in Newton over a letter of eight pages to Rena, and Rex was alone to pull through as he could. Throwing himself at last upon the couch he fell asleep and when he awoke the pain in his head was better, but he did not feel greatly rested, his sleep had been so disturbed with visions of the well and the broken glass, and Nannie lying dead upon the pines and a regal-looking woman sitting near her, smiling, gracious and dignified as she always was. He looked at his watch and saw it was half-past five, and knowing dinner would be served in half an hour, and that Mr. McPherson was nearly as punctual as Mrs. Parks, he hurried his toilet and was in the dining-room before Colin, who, when he came, asked where he was all the morning that he did not come in till after lunch and then did not care for any.
“With a girl, I suppose,” and he laughed meaningly, while Rex felt suddenly a desire to tell the whole story and see what his host thought of it.
“Yes, I was with a girl,” he said, and Colin continued, “Miss Burdick, Miss Irene?”
“Yes, with Miss Irene, in the pine-grove.”
“What were you doing in the pines?”
“I looked in the well and broke the mirror,” Rex answered, with a fearlessness which astonished himself.