'But he's trying to get you back. I know it.'
'You think he'd take me back?' she asked the question half bitterly, half soberly, and for a moment she fingered the sheet, draping a future that lay as imperturbable as a corpse.
'Do you want him to?' said Dick violently. 'I'd rather see you dead first.'
'It isn't on the cards,' she stated quietly. She had no clear idea of her own hopes, let alone Archie's intentions. She said as much to Dick. He caught up her words.
'Yes, what's he up to, Norah?' Dick's voice was eager. 'What's his game? Hasn't he given any idea?'
'Has he any "game"?' she asked wearily. 'Unless fighting with beasts in your heart is a game.'
'Why did he give me those cartridges?' persisted Dick. 'He wasn't keen on me touching his ammunition last night!' he added with a laugh, and made Norah the confidante of his nocturnal adventure.
As a word, or a tune, or a scent may fire a train of latent memory and illumine or connect experiences till then dark and unrelated, so Dick's story threw across his actions a beam as unsparing as the blue glare of some great arc light in a main street that midnight, rain, and frost had emptied.
Memories crossed her mind like pictures on a screen. Again Dick humbled himself on the shore of the lake, and again she heard the paddles splash as the Hindoo disappeared across the water. She saw Dick's helpless stare as he sat limply on the pile of baggage contemplating the disaster he had provoked and was impotent to stem. She felt him tugging at her sleeves in naked terror of Archie's decision in the hills. His breath was warm on her face, urging her to beg the man they had wronged for a few days' life. She blushed with shame at his advice to offer to go back, a promise, said he, that need not be kept.
A dozen times he was convicted of meanness, ingratitude, treachery. She saw for a bungler and a coward the man she had left all to follow. The man she had loved—that she still loved for all she knew. Feeling was dried out of her by pain and anxiety, but her brain told her that, if ever the crisis passed, she would find the image of Dick still near her heart.