“Oh, she’ll say it all; besides, perhaps she’ll be out—leave a card—got one of mine?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“Well.”
As they turned into Grand Street and hesitated a moment as to their direction, Warrener suggested:
“Might as well walk along up toward the McAllister place; it’s as good a walk as any.”
As they started off in the fresh, crisp air, refreshing and sweet to the man’s nostrils, stimulating and revivifying after his close confined days, a sudden impulse to have the woman by his side nearer him overcame him; he drew her arm through his.
“Let’s walk arm in arm, like old married couples.”
But Mrs. Warrener held back and took her arm away.
“No,” she demurred; “I think it’s common.”
In the following days Mrs. Warrener took up her life, or, more accurately, began it, standing on the threshold of an abyss—the flight of steps before her that led to the new. As she had never been particularly interested in anything, she did not know that she was an invalid with a fatal malady, a malady whose term is too commonly employed by people whose reason for the state is less apparent than this woman’s in a country town. She had never heard the word “boredom” used.