"No, Mr. Herrick. I was at the door when they come out. I saw her face clear. I didn't make no mistake this time."
"And you didn't follow?"
"No, sir. Because—because—Oh, Mr. Herrick, she seen me as plain as I see you an' she smiled at me!"
Herrick paused with a threatening cry. "Why didn't you speak to her, then? Why didn't you tell—"
"Because, Mr. Herrick, when she opened her eyes wide and smiled at me, that way, she put her finger to her lips! Oh, Mr. Herrick, I ain't ever told a soul but you!"
She put her finger to her lips! Secret she had ever been, and there was another way in which Christina had never failed. She had never failed, in any stress of change or chance, to seize the measure of a devotion and use it to its hilt.
She smiled and put her finger to her lips! She pleased herself, then! She was free! She came and went at her own pleasure! Secretly, with companions of her choice! While he, in the room below—That night, too! That night of the road and the fields, of Denny and the yellow house!
Bitterness mastered him. An indifference like the indifference of sleep somehow wearied him to the bone. After Joe's departure, when he stopped under a street-lamp to open Mrs. Deutch's letter, he scarcely cared what it contained.
"—When you were not at home he sent this to me. Think you for yourself the meaning for it. What in myself I believed and prayed, that afternoon, now in person have I ascertained. Christina was born in this city of New York; she was baptized in the same month in the Church of the Holy Service, April 17, 1892."
He unfolded Gabrielli's cablegram: