They were in Mrs. Follette’s room. She had told her son about her heart attack, and he had been anxious. But she had been quite herself after and had made light of it. “I shall have Hallam over in the morning,” he had insisted, and she had acquiesced. “I don’t need him, but if it will make you feel better.”
Evans told her “good-night” presently and went into his own room. It was flooded with moonlight. He curled up on the cushions of the window-seat, with his arms around his knees and thought of Jane. He did not know that she had been that day in his room. Yet she was there now—a shadowy presence. The one woman in the world for him. The woman who had lighted his way. Who still, thank God, lighted it, though she was not his and would never be.
In a few short weeks she would be married. Would go out of his life—forever. Yet what she had been to him, Towne could never take away. The little Jane of Sherwood whom Evans had known would never belong absolutely to her husband. Her spirit would escape him—come back where it belonged, to the man who worshipped her.
He stood up, struck a match and lighted the low candle in the old lantern. It would burn dimly until he was asleep. Night after night he had opened his eyes to see it burning. It seemed to him that his dreams were less troubled because of that dim lantern.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE DISCORDANT NOTE
Lucy was still to Eloise Harper the stenographer of Frederick Towne. Out of place, of course, in this fine country house, with its formal gardens, its great stables, its retinue of servants.
“What do you do with yourselves?” she asked her hostess, as she came down, ready for dinner, in revealing apricot draperies and found Lucy crisp in white organdie with a band of black velvet around her throat.
“Do?” Lucy’s smile was ingenuous. “We are very busy, Del and I. We feed the pigs.”