They bade each other good night and good-by there; but their embrace was appropriately matter-of-fact, galvanized ware upon cold iron. They tiptoed wearily up the service stairway and into the main corridor above.
Here, too, there was daylight like dirty pond water. Persis went stealthily to the railing of the stairway, and, glancing down, beckoned to Forbes, who moved to her side and peered where she pointed.
He saw that Willie Enslee, exhausted by his vigil, had fallen asleep on a sumptuous divan. The divan would have honored a palace, and Willie's pajamas were of silk, and his bathrobe was of brocaded silk. But after all it was Willie Enslee that was in them. And he slept with his little eyes clenched and his mouth ajar. And a cold cigarette was stuck to his lower lip.
Forbes was impelled to taunt her with a whispered: "There is your husband. Go to him!"
But when he looked at her she was so wan and pitiful that he could not be as pitiless as the wan daylight was. She was making an advance payment on her price; and she was shivering and lonely. So he kissed her icy hands and whispered to her how beautiful she was and a sorrowful "God bless you!" and sneaked back into his room, his bachelor room.
Had he paused as once before to throw her another kiss, he would have found her with her arms stretched out to him pleading for rescue from the vision she had seen and the unspoken taunt she had understood. But he did not look back, and she dared not knock at his door. The click of his lock frightened her, and she fled to her room like a ghost surprised by the morning.
CHAPTER XLIV
WHEN Forbes shut the door upon Persis (and unwittingly shut out her little gesture of appeal to come back, be stronger than she was, and rescue her from herself in spite of herself) he looked from his room upon a world that was just the colorless color of the glass in his window.
There was a menace of rain in the sky, and the dawn was a colorless affair, neither night nor morning. The day woke like a sleeper that has not rested well.