"I am throwing everything to the winds, Dodo!—giving up my whole life for you!" he said breathlessly. "You will come, Dodo?"
"I will—I must!" she said in wonder.
CHAPTER XXXII
Massingale had come so tempestuously, had gone so like a roaring blast, that she had felt swept up and whirled about in a revolving, benumbing cycle. She followed him in a daze to the hall, leaning over the balusters, watching the slipping white of his hand descend and vanish. She crossed to the window, peering through the blurred dripping panes for a last sight of his skidding car. Then she returned, perceived the door left open, closed it and came incredulously back.
"So I am going! It's all decided. All!" she whispered.
It was no longer the fabric of dreams, but actuality, that confronted her. This was new, uncomprehended, despite all her dramatizations. This was a fact. She was to leave in two hours, vanish forever from the curious massive room, with its belfried clock over the roofs and its blank brick wall at the side, out into the gray restlessness of a March night. Whither? With whom? With a strange man—a Massingale she had wrought herself, and whom she now scarcely recognized.
"I love him. I said I would go! It's what I've wanted all along!" she repeated, struck by the idea. "Yes, that's true; it's what I've wanted!"
But now there was a difference. For the first time, it was not she who sought to incite him to misty romance, but the man himself who had come and asked. It was no longer a question of how he loved, where he would go at her beckoning, her will over him. All this had been miraculously achieved. It was now only a matter of what she would do, and she had said that she would go—in two short hours! She remained immovable and listening, and already it seemed to her that she felt the shaken iron rush of a flying train, hurrying her onward into the unknown.
"Snyder!"