The return of Captain Dexter made further speech between them impossible. Belinda would not even take Sanderson's hand when the visitors departed.
CHAPTER XIII
THE PREPARATION
Belinda Melnotte took to her lodging that night a heavy and troubled spirit. Sanderson's visit to the hospital had lifted not at all the burden of doubt and unhappiness that she had borne so long.
She confessed to herself—and confessed it with shame—that the appearance of the young aviator had caused her joy unspeakable. When he had clasped her hands she had been obliged to fix her gaze elsewhere that Sanderson might not see in her eyes the very expression he evidently longed to see there.
Yet, how she had dismissed and flouted him! Every word she said in spurning his half-spoken address had cut her own heart like a knife.
She loved him. She needed him particularly now in her heavy trials and ungrateful tasks at the hospital. Ah, if beside her stood just such a strong-souled, tender yet cheering presence as the aviator possessed!
Yet she cried: "Unworthy! Unworthy! He must be bad! He is!"
That other woman and her children stood beside the aviator in Belinda's vision. She could not recall his presence to her thought without bringing up, too, the wraiths of the family he must wrong in his thoughts every time he tried to address her—Belinda—with affection!
Even if he contemplated divorcing Stella, the Red Cross nurse could not think of him as her fit mate. It was against her religious training and abhorrent to her own conscience.