Up-stairs in her own chamber she gazed about the pretty furnishings with blank eyes. There was the writing-desk that her mother gave her Christmas, there glistened the new dressing-table that Margaret helped her about finishing, and there was the new paper with the sprawly flowers that she thought so ugly in the pattern, and took under protest, and liked so much on the walls. How often she had been unjust to her people, and yet it had turned out that they were right! Her thoughts rambled on through a thousand memories, stumbling now into pit-falls of remorse over long-forgotten petulance and ingratitude and hardenings of her heart against kindness, again recovering and threading some narrow way of possible release, only to sink as the wall closed again hopelessly about her.
For the first time she arraigned her own vanity as the cause of her long unhappiness. Well, it was no use now. All she could do for them would be to drift forever out of their lives. She opened the drawer, and took a vial from a secret corner. “It is only a little faintness and numbness, and then it is all over,” she thought, as she slipped the vial into the chatelaine bag at her waist. In a sudden gust of courage she took it out again; but that instinctive trusting to hope to the last, which urges the most desperate of us on delay, held her hand. She put back the vial, and, without a final glance, went down the stairs. It was in her heart to have one more look at her mother, but at the drawing-room door she heard voices, and happening to glance up at the clock, she saw how near the time the hour was; so she hurried through the hall into the street.
During the journey she hardly felt a distinct thought. But at intervals she would touch the outline of the vial at her waist.
The justice’s office was in the second story of a new brick building that twinkled all over with white mortar. Below, men laughed, and glasses and billiard-balls clicked behind bright new green blinds. A steep, dark wooden stairway, apparently trodden by many men who chewed tobacco and regarded the world as their cuspidor, led between the walls up to a narrow hall, at the farther end of which a door showed on its glass panels the name L. B. Leitner, J.P.
Abbie rapped feebly on the glass, to see the door instantly opened by Slater himself. He had donned a glossy new frock-coat and a white tie. His face was flushed.
“I didn’t intend you should have to enter here alone,” he exclaimed, drawing her into the room with both hands; “I was just going outside to wait for you. Allow me to introduce Squire Leitner. Squire, let me make you acquainted with Miss Courtlandt, the lady who will do me the honor.”
He laughed a little nervous laugh. He was plainly affecting the manner of the fortunate bridegroom, and not quite at ease in his rôle. Neither of the two other men in the room returned any answering smile.
The justice, a bald, gray-bearded, kindly, and worried-looking man, bowed and said, “Glad to meet you, ma’am,” in a tone as melancholy as his wrinkled brow.
“Squire is afraid you are not here with your own free-will and consent, Abbie,” said Slater, airily; “but I guess you can relieve his mind.”
At the sound of her Christian name (which he had never pronounced before) Abbie turned white with a sort of sick disgust and shame. But she raised her eyes and met the intense gaze of the tall, dark man that she had seen before. He stood, his elbow on the high desk and his square, clean-shaven chin in his hand. He was neatly dressed, with a rose in his button-hole, and an immaculate pink-and-white silk shirt; but he hardly seemed (to Abbie) like a man of her own class. Nevertheless, she did not resent his keen look; on the contrary, she experienced a sudden thrill of hope—something of the same feeling she had known years and years ago, when she ran away from her nurse, and a big policeman found her, both her little slippers lost in the mud of an alley, she wailing and paddling along in her stocking feet, and carried her home in his arms.