She stood waiting for him, grim, wan, her nostrils wide and taut, her lips thin and tight, her eyes ransacking his very soul.
And so he said:
“You are wonderful!”
And then she broke down across the arm he thrust out to catch her; and she wept upon his heart, caressing his cheek with stroking hands, while she sobbed:
“I love you. You are so sweet. Poor Harry, I thought they had killed him! He was so stupid! But you are so sweet!”
And never was word bitterer in a man’s ears than that reiterated “sweet.”
CHAPTER XII
Fiends of suspicion laughed at the tenderness in RoBards’ heart as he upheld his wife. The fiends called it “complacency.” Fiends of irony mocked that complacency and told him that it was not lofty idealism or even consideration for her that withheld his wrath, but only a voluptuous unwillingness to surrender the possession of her pretty form.
But whatever his true motives, he was more helpless than Chalender, where he found him prone on a couch in the library, biting on a mouthful of tufted quilt and stuffing it down his throat to stifle his howls of pain as the country doctor swabbed with a coarse towel the dirty red channel in his back.
Chalender rolled his eyes up whitely at RoBards from the pit of hell, and then his gaunt face turned into snowflake marble as his head fell forward and he fainted.