“As you wish,” she said gravely. “Courage, and God keep you, my dear.”
She went up the steps slowly, looking back, and her eyes for a moment lingered, smiling down on me, before she could find courage to end a look that might be the last. The door closed and shut her out from me.
* * * * *
And from these moments, sanctified in my memory, by the perverse turns of my fate, that seems to entangle all the skeins of my life, the good and the evil, I came back to meet—Letty.
She was in the salon that separated our rooms when I entered, and from the look on Ben’s face I saw that his soul was being torn to its foundations. At my entrance they stopped, in a sudden telltale silence.
“You here, Letty?” I said, stupidly enough. God knows that no more unwelcome figure could have come before me at that moment.
She nodded curtly, but did not speak. She looked quite worn despite her artifice, and in her cold face the eyes burned forth as they did only when she was roused to some fury of obstinate determination. The conversation had been at a high tension, as I could see by Ben’s ugly frown. I went into my bedroom and closed the door and, overcome by the moral nausea of this malignant intrusion across the clean memory of the evening’s exaltation, I sank on the bed and, taking my head in my hands, cursed her from the bitterness of my heart as I have never cursed another human being.
Not that she had come to see me. I knew too well the only genuine impulse of which in her tired experience she was capable. It was only the prey which was escaping her that could rouse the female in her. I did not know how far Ben had gone in his revolt,—though I suspected that he had given an ultimatum. But I knew this, that Letty would never let him go without a struggle. What to do? My lips were sealed: the slightest false move might precipitate a tragedy. An hour passed, while I listened to the falling and rise of their contending voices, when, suddenly, the door opened and banged, and Ben came into the room.
“For God’s sake, David, get her away!”