"I'm going to France to-morrow," she said. "He won't like that. It will be the same as striking him in the face. He to turn from me to other women who had no money to give him—! When a man sees that what he has tossed in the gutter is precious to another man, when he sees how the other man picks it up,—he feels cheated. It hits him harder than if you had killed yourself. I thought of that first. But don't you do it! I knew just how he'd say—'Mad! quite mad!' and bury me and forget me. He'll never lose sight of it if I go away like this—" and her voice rose high—"that will let him know how I hate him!"
But when her confidences had tired her out, and she loosed her clasp of Susan, pulling up the quilt and sinking into a wearied slumber,—when the girl lay gazing alone at a light that was burning dim;—there was a cry in the silence.
"I've come back, Dicky! Dicky, let me in—! I've come back."
It was the woman who hated her husband, calling to him in her sleep.
*****
Susan awakened in the morning with music in her ears. Dreaming, she danced with Barnaby, and his arm was round her, his breath quick on her cheek, his face not ... kind.
And as the wild illumination of a dream sometimes teaches what a stumbling consciousness dare not know, so the girl awoke trembling.
But that dream of all dreams was madness.
Into her waking mind came the thought of Rackham, the man who had said he loved her. Had she not always been ill at ease with him, and what was that but a warning instinct, divining, shrinking from the peril in a man's admiration? But Barnaby and she had been such good comrades....
Quaint incidents crowded on her, scenes in the hunting field, Sunday afternoons at the stables,—the day he had cut his finger and she had run to him to bind it up;—the day he had told her the brim of her riding hat was too narrow, and made her try on another that satisfied his inspection.... Oh, they had honourably tried not to haunt each other, but all the same.... Dear and safe memories; they blotted out last night.