“You don’t want to give way like that,” he continued. “It doesn’t do you any good. I know how you feel about leaving home, but tears won’t help it any. It isn’t as if you were going away for good, you know. Besides, you’ll be going back shortly. You care for me, don’t you, sweet? I’m something?”
“Yes,” she said, and managed to smile back at him.
Lester returned to his correspondence and Jennie fell to thinking of Vesta. It troubled her to realize that she was keeping this secret from one who was already very dear to her. She knew that she ought to tell Lester about the child, but she shrank from the painful necessity. Perhaps later on she might find the courage to do it.
“I’ll have to tell him something,” she thought with a sudden upwelling of feeling as regarded the seriousness of this duty. “If I don’t do it soon and I should go and live with him and he should find it out he would never forgive me. He might turn me out, and then where would I go? I have no home now. What would I do with Vesta?”
She turned to contemplate him, a premonitory wave of terror sweeping over her, but she only saw that imposing and comfort-loving soul quietly reading his letters, his smoothly shaved red cheek and comfortable head and body looking anything but militant or like an avenging Nemesis. She was just withdrawing her gaze when he looked up.
“Well, have you washed all your sins away?” he inquired merrily.
She smiled faintly at the allusion. The touch of fact in it made it slightly piquant.
“I expect so,” she replied.
He turned to some other topic, while she looked out of the window, the realization that one impulse to tell him had proved unavailing dwelling in her mind. “I’ll have to do it shortly,” she thought, and consoled herself with the idea that she would surely find courage before long.
Their arrival in New York the next day raised the important question in Lester’s mind as to where he should stop. New York was a very large place, and he was not in much danger of encountering people who would know him, but he thought it just as well not to take chances. Accordingly he had the cabman drive them to one of the more exclusive apartment hotels, where he engaged a suite of rooms; and they settled themselves for a stay of two or three weeks.