“But, Vanya dear––” Palla looked at him miserably, conscious of her own keen fears as well as of his sorrow. “Don’t you think she’ll come back? Do you suppose it is really so serious––what she thinks about––Mr. Shotwell?”
He shook his head: “I don’t know.... If it is so, it is so. Freedom is of first importance. Our creed 280 is our creed. We must abide by what we teach and believe.”
“Yes.”
He nodded absently, staring palely into space.
Perhaps his lost gaze evoked the warm-skinned, sunny-haired girl who had gone out of the semi-light of this still place, leaving the void unutterably vast around him. For this had been the lithe thing’s silken lair––the slim and supple thing with beryl eyes––here where thick-piled carpets of the East deadened every human movement––where no sound stirred, nor any air––where dull shapes loomed, lacquered and indistinct, and an odour of Chinese lacquer and nard haunted the tinted dusk.
Like one of those lazy, golden, jewelled sea-creatures of irresponsible freedom brought seemed to fill the girl cooler currents arouses a restlessness infernal, Marya’s first long breath of freedom subtly excited her.
She had no definite ideas, no plans. She was merely tired of Vanya.
Perhaps her fresh, wholesome contact with Jim had started it––the sense of a clean vitality which had seemed to envelop her like the delicious, half-resented chill of a spring-pool plunge. For the exhilaration possessed her still; and the sudden stimulation which the sense of irresponsible freedom brought seemed to fill the girl with a new vigour.
Foot-loose, heart-loose, her green eyes on the open world where it stretched away into infinite horizons, she paced her new nest in the Hotel Rajah, tingling with subdued excitement, innocent of the faintest regret for what had been.