For a moment her face went down into her hands, and the hopeless grief of unfortunate love mastered her, tore her throat with its sobs, burned her eyes with its bitter tears. But presently her head was up again, and with shaking fingers she was bathing her eyes, concealing as best she could the ravages of that instant's surrender. She had no rights in this thing; she had not even the right to suffer. Ted or Eric might come in at any moment, and they must not see that she had wept; she was theirs.
She had no right to suffer. There could be only one right course in this; to fight, to crush out of herself what she was not free to feel, to put between herself and Peter some barrier that could not be destroyed. There was Ted, there was Eric—they should have been barriers enough. But they had not been barriers enough, and there must be another. There must be something—some one—more, to keep her safe, to hold her heart, her thoughts, from this forbidden haven. There must be something—some one—else—. And then her mind leaped to Charlotte. Charlotte loved Peter; she had practically admitted that. Well, she should marry him—as she'd said that she might do. Though it broke her own heart, Charlotte should marry Peter. She herself would arrange it.
She did not pause to consider that Peter might not want to marry Charlotte, that he might not be happy in doing so. She did not pause, yet, to question—she did not dare to question, indeed—whether Peter turned her own love. She was intent upon but one end: to protect herself from what she felt for him, from what she would continue to feel for him as long as he was free.
With this haste and need and fear upon her, she wrote to him, asking him to come to her the next afternoon. It would be their first meeting since Ted's ban upon their friendship, and she realized, with fresh humiliation, that in spite of everything, she was glad of this chance to be with Peter. She realized that she could scarcely wait until the morrow should bring him to her. Because she was thus glad, she almost decided not to send her note after all, and then—lest she would not!—she hurried out and mailed it herself.
Somehow she got through dinner and the evening. She heard Eric's lessons and tucked him away for the night with a bedtime story and the kisses that, when no one was looking on, he was eager enough to receive. She listened to Ted's anecdotes of the day and responded with a mechanical vivacity. Then, at last, she was hidden by the night, freed by the night—though she lay by Ted's side.
She had no right to suffer, but she did suffer now. As Peter had done months before, she suffered through the darkness. But with her there was no yielding to dear visions of a forbidden love, as there had been with him; there was no picturing of life as it might have been with him; no thrilling to the imaginary caresses and delights of a passion which, in her married self, was wholly unworthy. Rather was the night a long battle with the love that it so shamed her to find within herself. Thus, in this distress of her soul, she was at least spared the physical torture which Peter had endured. Not for an instant was her love for Peter translated, in her mind, into physical terms; she neither imagined nor desired its touch; in her guilt there was a strange innocence—an innocence characteristic of her. She would go through life unaware of the grosser aspects of things; under any circumstances, however equivocal, she would be curiously pure. In one thing only did she fall now to the level of less idealistic beings; in spite of her struggle to the contrary, she wondered, at last, if Peter loved her. She dared and stooped, in the privacy of the night, to wonder that.
When Peter came to her the next afternoon, he found her haggard, but very quiet, very calm. Beneath her calmness, however, he divined the stir of troubled depths, and he carefully kept to the surface; ignored his long banishment; took up one impersonal topic after another for her entertainment; and was altogether so much the safe, unromantic, delightful old friend of the family that, but for the hammering of her pulses, he would have persuaded Sheila that the distress of the past night was a mere, ugly dream. But because she could not look at him without a catch of her breath; because she could not speak to him without first pausing to steady her voice; because all her tranquility was but desperate and painful effort, she knew the night was no dream, but even more of a reality than she had thought.
"Peter," she said at last, with attempted lightness, "Peter, I'm going to meddle with your destiny."
"What do you mean?" he asked, smiling at her.
That smile of his almost cost her her self-control, so dear it was to her. But she went on bravely enough: "I'm going to secure you a wife."