She doubted whether she had really said it; but it continued to taunt her. She tested her memory by omitting his name at the end; but back it came again and again; and the name with its deep insult, its ugly disavowal of their kinship, was always the climax of every sentence.
“Ezra Dameron!”
In her memory it rose at the end just as it had risen and clung in the room below as she had spoken it. It seemed to her that it must be ringing across the night; and it was all wrong, wrong, wrong! She bowed her head in her hands and wept.
She grew calm again as the night wore on. It seemed that she had been there in the dark room for an eternity when she heard a clock strike midnight in one of the lower rooms. She threw up a shade and looked out, finding in the lights of the streets and houses a grateful contact with the outer world. In a house that she identified she saw a light in the room of a girl she knew very well; and she fell to wondering about this friend, whose father was a well-known man of affairs,—whose name none spoke but to praise. She felt the sob coming into her throat, and drew down the blind as though to shut out the mockery the thought awakened of her own father.
“I wish you would not lie to me, Ezra Dameron!”
She threw herself on the bed and lay for long, dreaming, wondering. She thought of every place she had ever been, of every one she knew; and little things long forgotten sped past in the running flood-tide of memory.
At last she found a point of rest for her spirit. She needed help, and it was her right to demand it of her uncle. She had led a false life out of devotion to her mother’s memory, that no one might say that she had been weak where her mother had been strong; but it was at an end now. It would be a simple matter to leave the house at an early hour in the morning and go to her uncle’s door, or she could summon him to come to her; and while she debated which course she should adopt she fell asleep.
The first gray light of the autumn morning was breaking when she awoke, chilled and numbed. She was very tired from lying cramped in her clothes on the bed, but she arranged the pillows on a couch, and lay down on it, drawing a comforter about her.
Her thoughts found new channels. She watched the eastern window whiten slowly and listened to the first tentative notes of traffic in the street. She had been trying to avoid thinking of Morris Leighton, but the thought of him was sweet in her heart. He had offered her his love and she had repelled him, not as a woman may, with an honest denial, but in a spirit of hard rejection of all that life and love meant. As the dawn grew her thoughts sought little harbors of security and peace that her love for him made; and she fell asleep as a child will, when it has known a hurt in its little world, but finds oblivion at last under the soothing touch of loving hands.
She woke as the little French clock in her room chimed seven, and as she lay for a moment taking account of her surroundings, she heard a step in the hall outside her door. It was her father; he stood by her door an instant listening, and then passed on slowly to the stairway.