"What makes you think that?" she asked gravely.
He looked away and muttered something about "Thompson," and "the journey." Again that look of agonized comprehension!
She said nothing. She knew that he had lied. Ah, to what pitiful shifts she had driven him!
He hurried off to his appointment, and she lay on her couch by the window with clenched hands and closed eyelids. She had no sensations to speak of; but thought came to her—confused, overwhelming thought—an agony of ideas. She loved him. Ah, the shame of it! And that hidden hope of hers became a terror. Mrs. Nevill Tyson's soul was struggling with its immortality. The hot flare of summer was in the streets and in the room; the old life was surging everywhere around her; above the brutal roar and gust of it, blown from airy squares, flung back from throbbing thoroughfares, she caught responsive voices, rhythmic, inarticulate murmurs, ripples of the resonant joy of the world. Down there, in their dim greenery, the very plane-trees were whispering together under the shadow of the great flats.
What were these things to Mrs. Nevill Tyson? She had entered the New Life, as you enter heaven, alone.
CHAPTER XVIII
A MIRACLE
In the afternoon of the following day Tyson was sitting with Molly in the dining-room when he was told that Captain Stanistreet had called and had asked to see him. "Was he—?" Yes, the Captain was in the drawing-room. Tyson was a little surprised at the announcement; for though the shock of the fire had somewhat obscured his recollection of the events that preceded it, Molly had unfortunately recalled them to his memory. But he had clean forgotten some of the details. Consequently he was more than a little surprised when Stanistreet, without any greeting or formality whatsoever, took two letters from his pocket and flung one of them on the window-seat.
"That's your letter," he said. "And here's the answer."