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| "A maiden's vow, old Calham spoke, |
| Is lightly made and lightly broke." |
As the cab rattled down the avenue, Winifred sank back against the cushions. She sat in the corner in a sort of daze, marking the glimmer of the electric lights, which seemed so many milestones in her life, as she passed them one after another. After all, it is experience which marks time, and in this day Winifred Anstice had tasted more of life than in many a year before. Crashing into her world of calm commonplace had fallen the dynamite bomb of an overwhelming emotion. Her present, with all its preoccupying trifles, lay in wrecks about her. For the future—it was too tumultuous to be faced.
She was like a person who has been walking in the darkness along a familiar road, and suddenly feels himself plunging over an unsuspected precipice. She was conscious of nothing but a gasping sense of dizziness—all control of herself and her life seemed passing out of her hands [Pg 290] into those of another, and she scarcely knew whether to be glad or sorry. Was it only this afternoon that she had looked upon a marriage with Jonathan Flint as impossible? If she had thought so a few hours ago, why not now? Nothing had occurred since. No transcendent change had come over him or her—why should it all look so different to her now? Perhaps, she told herself, this mood too would pass like its precursor. She dared not feel sure of anything—she who had swung round the whole compass of feeling like a weather-vane before a thunder-storm.
These introspective reflections brought back irresistibly the feelings with which she had read Flint's letter, little dreaming that it was his,—the letter so full of wise and friendly counsel. She remembered how, as she read, she had been filled with a yearning desire to rise to the ideal her unknown counsellor had set before her, and filled too with a longing that Fate might send it in her way, to be something to him, to return in some measure the spiritual aid and comfort which she had received at his hands.
"Well," she told herself gloomily, "the opportunity had come, and this was how she had used it—not only by denying his petition,—that, of course, was inevitable, feeling as she did,—but by accusing him of selfishness, by insisting [Pg 291] that he should accept her terms of friendship. Friendship, bah!—how stale and flat it sounded! Could she not have devised some newer way of wounding an honorable man who had offered her his heart?"
It seemed to her excited consciousness that she must appear to him a vain and empty coquette, eager to retain a homage for which she intended no return. When once he awoke to that view, his love would die out, for he was not a man to continue devotion where he had lost respect; and so it was all over, or as good as over, between her and him.
The cab lurched sharply across the tracks at Twenty-Third Street, jostling Winifred's flowers and fan out of her lap. The maid stooped to pick them up. As she returned them she caught a glimpse of the set look in the face of her mistress.
"Are you feelin' bad?" she asked.
"No, no, I am quite well, Maria, only a little tired—are we near home?"