Their mutual courtesy had reached the limit of extreme tension. Parker Steel, who had been watching the lightning flashes, the play between positive clouds and negative earth, opened the door to let the imminent storm disperse.
Catherine passed out with a slight bending of the head.
“How beautiful these July days are!” she remarked.
“Superb,” and Steel took leave of her with a cynical smile.
CHAPTER XVIII
Catherine’s lips were tightly set as she turned from the shadows of St. Antonia’s elms, where the sunlight made a moving fret of gold upon the grass. The sky was a broad canopy of blue above the town, the wooded hills about it far and faint with haze. To Catherine the summer stillness of the place, the dim blazoned windows of the church, the wreathing smoke, the circling pigeons, were parts of a quaint and homely tenderness that made her realize the more the repellent coldness of the house she had just left.
She had come by one conviction through her visit, the conviction that those two intellectualists hungered to humiliate her and her husband. Mrs. Betty’s eyes had betrayed too much. She would be content with nothing but sensational head-lines, and the discussion of “the scandal” in every Roxton home. The brain behind that ethereal yet supercilious face knew no flush of feeling for a rival in distress. The pair were exulting over the chance James Murchison had given them, and the wife had realized it with a bitter flooding up of loyalty and love.
Catherine had made her plans before she reached the glare of Lombard Street. She had left her husband sitting in the darkened room, the blinds drawn down over his humiliation and self-shame. Her heart grieved in her for the strong man whose sensitive consciousness had been paralyzed by the realization of his own irrevocable blunder. Her pity left him undisturbed, like a sick man needing rest. Inglis had taken the work for the whole day, for Catherine had interviewed him in the surgery, and shocked the theorist by imparting a portion of the truth to him.
“Incredible!” had been Mr. Inglis’s solitary remark, and Catherine’s heart had blessed him for that single adjective.
As she passed the house in Lombard Street, her face seemed overshadowed for the moment by the unpropitious heaviness of her thoughts. The vision of her husband’s pale and troubled face saddened her more utterly than any regretfulness her pride might feel. Nor did she pass her home unchallenged, for at the barred but open window of the nursery, a ripple of gold in the sunlight bathed her daughter Gwen’s round face,