Augusta's poised hand fell mechanically to the paper and began to write.
She had seen no more. All that day and yesterday she had strained at the windows of her soul, praying and striving to catch again a sight of her loved one. But there had come to her nothing but a cold, terrifying conviction that Jimmie was dead. It must be that he was dead, for if he were alive she was sure that she could make him know that she was crying to him, and she would be able to see him.
Through two days of heart agony she had walked and worked, her body and her outward mind responding capably to the demands of each minute, while her own inner being struggled with the desperation of death, to free itself from the limitations of the senses, so that it might find its mate. But, though her soul had cried and fought and suffered until it seemed that she herself must die, there had come to her vision nothing but the black wall of death.
Jimmie was dead. There was a corpse lying out somewhere under a bank—maybe the dirt had rolled down over it now—and that was the end. There was nothing more. The black conviction of despair, of hope dead and buried, settled down upon her. Her love was dead. This world was empty, and there was no other.
Late at night, lying alone in her little wood-walled room over in the nurses' pavilion, writhing in her pain, Augusta had spoken aloud.
"You fooled me, God," she said bitterly. "You taught me to believe. And there is nothing—nothing."
But the sound of her own voice in the uninterested darkness had turned her thought back to her self. She had only herself to blame. She had cheated herself. She had built up for herself a dream. How could she complain that she should not find it to be only a dream?
Three years ago, on that hideous last day in the little house among the trees in the Hills of Desire, she had stood looking at a scattered bundle of letters, and she had seen a glimpse of a woman's face, a dark, discontented, attractive face.
At that moment there had come into her mind, full formed, the thought that had been the key to her action and to the words that she had written on the typewriter for Jimmie.
She did not know whether Jimmie loved this woman. She did not greatly believe that he did. But it had come to her that her love was spoiled even by the thought that that other woman had looked at it. There was not room for her love in the same world where that other woman lived. Augusta could not share her love loaf even so much as to have it in the same world where there was another who thought greedily upon it.