And then Gell! Although nobody else had understood her, he had done so. He might have been living in a fool's paradise, but was it for her her to reveal the awful truth to him? In public, too, and at that harrowing moment?
To escape from the pain of self-reproach she kept on telling herself, as she went back in the train, that Stowell had deceived her. Oh, if he had only confessed, at any rate to her, she thought she could have forgiven him in spite of all. But no, he had hidden everything down to the last moment, and left her to find him out.
On reaching home she excused herself to old Miss Green and hurried up to her bedroom. Her head ached and her heart was sore—the young woman she had been working for had been found guilty and condemned. She told her maid she was tired, and if anybody asked for her she was not to be disturbed.
Two hours passed. Her heart was going through a wild riot of mingled anger and love. It was like madness. She loved Stowell; she hated him; she worshipped him; she despised him. At one moment she recalled with a bitter laugh the mockery of his questioning of Bessie Collister in the dock; at the next she remembered with scorching tears the pathos of his sentencing her.
Obscure motives were operating in her soul to intensify her pain. Jealous? She, jealous of that illiterate country girl who had murdered her illegitimate child—what nonsense! No, her idol was broken. She had set it so high and now it was in the dust.
She expected Stowell to come to her as soon as his Court was over. Again and again she raised her head from her wet pillow to listen for the sound of his car on the drive. Yet when a knock came at her door and her maid announced the arrival of the Deemster (never dreaming that the injunction against callers had been intended to apply to him) her first impulse was to send him away.
"Say I'm unwell and can't see him," she cried from her bed.
But at the next moment she was up and whispering at the door,
"Show Mr. Stowell into the library and tell him I shall be down presently."
Her voice was hoarse; her face was aflame; her eyes were red from persistent weeping. No water could sponge away those marks of her emotion. Never mind! He should see how he had made her suffer. She would go downstairs and charge him, face to face, with his deceit and hypocrisy, and then—then fling herself into his arms.