“Are you going to see Ronnie again?” said Elizabeth, as they landed.
“Yes; he couldn’t be doing better, but I’ll look in, and to-morrow Skeffington will go with me so as to get him broken in to the change. We ought to get away all right now.”
David waked next day to find the sun shining in at his uncurtained window. From where he lay he could see the young blue of the sky, and all the room seemed full of the sun’s gold. David lay in a lazy contentment watching the motes that danced in a long shining beam. There was a new stir of life in his veins. He stretched out his limbs and was glad of their strength. The sweetness and the glory and the promise of the spring slid into his blood and fired it.
“Mary,” he said, still between sleeping and waking—and with the name, memory woke. Suddenly his brain was very clear. He looked straight ahead and saw the door that led into the other room—the room that had been his mother’s. Elizabeth was in that room. He had married Elizabeth—she was his wife. He lay quite still and stared at the door. Elizabeth Chantrey was Elizabeth Blake. She was his wife—and Mary——
A sudden spasm of laughter caught David by the throat. Mary was what she had promised to be—his sister; Mary was his sister. The spasm of laughter passed, and with it the stir in David’s blood. He was quite cool now. He lay staring at that closed door, and faced the situation.
It was a damnable situation, he decided. He felt as a man might feel who wakes from the delirium of weeks, to find that in his madness he has done some intolerable, some irrevocable thing. A man who does not sleep is a man who is not wholly sane. David looked back and followed the events of the last few months with a critical detachment.
He saw the strain growing and growing until, in the end, on the brink of the abyss, he had snatched at the relief which Elizabeth offered, as a man who dies of thirst will snatch at water. Well—he had taken Elizabeth’s draught of water, his thirst was quenched, he was his own man again. No, never his own man any more. Never free any more—Elizabeth’s debtor—Elizabeth’s husband.
David set his face like a flint—he would pay his debt.
He went out as soon as he had breakfasted and walked for a couple of hours. It was a little after noon when he came into the drawing-room where Elizabeth was.
The floor was covered with a great many yards of green stuff which she was cutting into curtain lengths. As David came in, she looked up and smiled.